Rovers were left speechless down in East Anglia, as despite showing good character, a poor first-half ultimately ‘shot themselves in the foot’. When he spoke with RoversTV, Jon Dahl Tomasson assessed the thrilling game, but also highlighted his frustrations around the ‘silly goals’ that his side conceded on the day.
“We’re extremely disappointed that we’ve lost after scoring three goals away from home, especially with so many loyal fans travelling a long distance. We must admit that the first-half was not good enough. It was not to Rovers’ standards or my standards. We gave away so many unnecessary goals and balls in-behind, we didn’t win our individual duels and were too late to the ball. That wasn’t good, but I thought the second-half was much better. The lads showed great character and mentality to come back to level the game at 3-3. I thought we saw the Rovers that we’ve seen over the last period, creating chances and scoring goals. It was an entertaining game, but when you score three away from home and don’t take a result back home, you should be extremely disappointed. It was sickening to lose a fourth goal so late on in the game, which isn’t great at all, and we’re all left frustrated.
“All four goals that we conceded today, were soft goals. You can always concede goals and make mistakes, but they were all very soft. When you concede goals, that means someone has made a mistake, but all four today were really unnecessary and soft.
“We were all extremely disappointed at half-time with the performance. We lacked bravery on the ball, we were slow on the ball, weren’t succeeding in our rotations and were second best to most duels. We always knew it was going to be tough, coming here to Ipswich Town who not only have started the season well, but have a great home record, yet we were unable to get going. That’s why I was extremely pleased in the second-half, because we played like we have been doing for the last period. We created chances and scored two great goals, but that made the late fourth even more frustrating.
“It’s very frustrating seeing us play how we did in the second-half and thinking, ‘Why could we not play like that in the first-half?’ The first-half cost us the game. I don’t really have anything else to add regarding the first period, we were very poor and weren’t doing the right things that we have worked on. We can’t be happy with that first-half, even if it is our third game of the week, we can’t use that as an excuse, it was unacceptable.
“When we get it back to 3-3, we have to take something from the game, although I thought we could have won the game, but that’s football. At the moment, Ipswich are doing very well, but they have also received a bit of luck to start the campaign.
“We all know that this is a young group who have a lot of room for development. There will be ups and downs during the season, hopefully there will be more ups than downs, but they are learning on the job at times.
“We knew that Arnór Sigurðsson is a good player, but we also know he’s coming from behind in regard to his fitness after his long injury. He played for the under-21s a few days ago, but it was great to see him score on his Rovers debut. We’ve not scored many, given all of the chances we’ve created this season, but we’ve scored three today! That was positive. We had already planned that he wouldn’t play the full game, not just because of his booking, but because we need to slowly build-up his fitness. Goals will give any player confidence, but I’m extremely pleased that Arnór’s even playing at the moment. We all know that we have a thin squad, so we’ll need everyone. He showed the fans the quality he has, with his goal and we need him to get into those positions more often, because he has the quality to score goals, but we should also be patient and give him time to get up to speed.
“Ryan Hedges went off in the second-half and he’s injured. He will be out for a while, but I’m not sure for how long at this moment. It didn’t look great, so we need to wait and see what the scans say, but we do know it will cost time. It seems like it’s a hamstring injury, so we’ll have to wait and see what the doctors and scans say.”
