After watching his side dominate the game, but only manage a draw against relegation-threatened Rotherham United, Tony Mowbray reflected on the afternoon in Yorkshire as he rued how his side had failed to leave Rotherham with all three points.
“I thought we should have up by four at half-time, with the amount of chances we had in the first-half and I’m going as far to say that even seven or eight wouldn’t have been an embarrassment. After all that, they then score from a free-kick that wasn’t even a foul, in my opinion, it was just two big guys competing for a header on the edge of the box. We’re left frustrated, but maybe it shouldn’t surprise us, because we have to be more clinical and take the chances when they present themselves. I don’t think I’m exaggerating by saying that we could have scored six or seven, today, but we didn’t take the chances.
“It was arguably a game that summed our season up. We had a lot of proper chances today, whereas in the past, we’ve mostly had half-chances. These were proper chances and we suffered the consequences of not converting them, with their free-kick at the end. The result doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, but it also does matter, because we want to win matches. In the bigger context of things, it’s just frustrating, because it’s an area which we have to improve upon. We’ve sat and talked about the 13 league games where we haven’t scored a goal, this year or when we’ve lost 1-0, but today’s game should have been out of sight at half-time, but it wasn’t and as a result, we’ve suffered by dropping two points in a game where we shouldn’t have dropped points.
“All you can do, is keep working on what you’re doing with individuals. You’ve got to keep taking them out at the end of training to work on their crossing and finishing and positioning in the box. That’s what football is. There’s nothing that we’re not doing, that I’m going to change by taking coaching sessions, other than repetition of good practice and working really hard as an individual to make better contact, to know when to fake a shot, chop it back or sit the goalie on his backside. All of those things are quality and what the top players do. Tight games in the Premier League are won because a world-class striker executes a world-class finish and with total respect, we’ve got a lot of young players who are working hard to get to that level and that journey has to continue for them. They have to keep working hard on the training ground to take more chances than they get.
“Today was a strange day. Sometimes, the referee let play go on, today and didn’t give what other referees would have normally given, and then for some reason, with a few minutes left he gives a foul when two big centre-halves are jumping for the ball! It’s embarrassing, really. It was a pathetic decision.
“The reason why we only had eight on the bench today, was because Tom Trybull had had a back scan and I decided that he didn’t have to continue to push through it, as he’s been doing for the past few weeks. So that took our 20-man squad down to 19. He’s not our player, and I wouldn’t want to put him in a situation where I’m telling him he has to play. I wasn’t thinking about putting experienced players on the pitch today, anyway, whatever the score was and yet, the game was so wrapped up, had we put it to bed earlier then the likes of (Jacob) Davenport and (John) Buckley would have been on the pitch. As it stayed tight, I thought the players that were already on the pitch deserved to stay on and try and win us the game, but that wasn’t the case.”
