Joey, after an encouraging performance and a clean sheet against Ipswich, have you noticed an upturn in the mood of the players going into the weekend?
Yeah, I think we needed it. A young group, certainly the back five and if you tap on the midfield lads in front of that, and new lads in there have not got off to a great start in the quartered jersey.
As always, confidence comes from two things in our game: good preparation and results. There is no other way about it and we had to meet one of the bigger teams in the division, we lost four league games on the spin and five if you tap in the Papa John’s Trophy and we had to stand up and be counted.
I thought the lads were magnificent in delivering a defensive performance on Tuesday night and there is no doubt confidence has been gained from that, but not as much confidence as if we would have won it.
Would it be simplistic and wrong to say you were more defensive in your preparation against Ipswich on Tuesday night?
We had to be. I hope one day to have their budget and if you give me £15million versus our £3m, I’d as Kieran (McKenna) if he would want to stand in the middle and trade blows because I guarantee he wouldn’t.
For us at that moment, it would have been a kamikaze approach and we had to adjust our strategy and show a different side to our team and me as a coach to nullify our opponent to give ourselves the best opportunity of winning the game.
They have completed 400 more passes than us, but recent weeks have shown it is not about completing passes and having possession because you have got to have a purpose and an end product to that.
You could argue on the weight of chances, we had the best chances. We were the only ones that hit the woodwork and I do think Jarell Quansah’s header in the first half from the corner was as good a chance as any in the game.
To get out of there with a clean sheet and a point was a step in the right direction for us, but I’m not sure Kieran’s well versed in the Mem. He said it was a cup final for our fans and they have all turned out, but we have been at capacity since the back end of last season and I just felt that was a little bit of a strange comment.
Based on my CV and his CV, there is no doubt who is the A-side if there was any cup final because he was a civilian until he started coaching.
James Belshaw had a night off on Tuesday. Is he back with the players or is he still away from the group?
He trained this morning, so he is back in and around the group. It was disappointing because you want people to be in the right frame of mind.
I understand the emotion of not getting selected by the manager, but also you have got to channel that into performance and backing up your team and supporting your teammates.
Belly is clearly aware of where it’s at and we put that behind us and move forward.
So will he back in contention on Saturday?
Yeah, he’s up for selection. He’s back training at the right intensity and I don’t carry grudges; if you do things right, there is no problem.
But if you want to try to do things slightly differently, unfortunately, I’ve got a duty of care to manage the group and the football club to the right standard of behaviour to make sure everybody understands our culture and what we want.
It has been clearly explained and I think we can move past that now and look to the future.
Ellery Balcombe is playing in goal and how important is it that everybody gets behind him because he is still a youngster and he’s playing in goal for Bristol Rovers?
He’s had the toughest shake-up of all the lads. It’s only the minority but he has maybe not given the welcome that you would expect from the Gasheads, although most have.
That can make it tricky and his performances, certainly in recent weeks, are the best antidote for that. You get a lot of naysayers in our game and people who criticise you. The only way you can respond to that is by playing really well and doing the best job you can and, eventually, they disappear into the ether.
I’m sure Ellery’s performance on Tuesday night will have converted a lot of sceptics and hopefully his performances in the next weeks and months will go a long way to cementing him as a favourite as other people have done in the past.
You are the manager and from the time I’ve known you, you’ll take any question and the stick, but for the players when the match is in progress, is it important they have everyone’s support?
I get if people make mistakes, the fans can criticise but it’s strange when people are criticising people before they have made an error or mistakes.
You pay your ticket money and your support is massive for us, but that is key, it has got to be support. I get at the end of the game or if things go wrong, fair enough, criticise, voice your objections. There is no problem with that, but before the game and while were right at the start and building into the game, you play for the badge on the front of the jersey. You don’t support on the name of the back of the jersey, you support the badge on the front.
Every player who pulls on the jersey goes out and gives his all for the team and when I first came to the football club that was the thing I said to the Gasheads about delivering. Could we have success and win games? Yeah, hopefully, but the one thing I will promise you is people will fight for the jersey and they will give everything they’ve got to represent the club in the right manner.
I think I have been true to my word since I came in and all we ask for is the backing and support to go out and do your club proud.
We are just custodians of the starting jersey or, for me, the managerial hot seat and we just want to do the best job we can. To do that, it helps a lot and makes it a lot easier if people are with you and supporting you.
I get it if it’s going wrong and we’re not good enough, feel free to criticise. That is part of the game.
Fifteen games to go and you have been so confident and ambitious about Rovers’ prospects. Do you still have ambitions of chasing the top six or is that becoming a bit distant? Is that a realistic ambition?
It’s getting a lot tougher the longer we go without getting in the winners’ column. For us, we’ve got to get back to winning ways.
Saturday presents an opportunity to do that and then it will be one game at a time.
We know we are capable of getting in and around that scene and I think the firepower of big clubs being big clubs was evident in January. They all got their war chests out and showed what they are capable of.
You look at that group now and it hasn’t skipped a beat. They have all carried on with momentum and we have had a tough period we have had to navigate through.
We’re not out of the woods yet. We’ve got a lot of tough games coming up and the focus has got to be on getting back in the winner's column and then if we can string a good run of results together, who knows, but we won’t be giving up until it’s mathematically impossible.
But also, we’ve not got to take our eyes off the prize and the opponent right in front of us.
Your opponent on Saturday is Burton. You beat them 4-0 earlier in the season. What kind of test will they be? Have they improved since you met them back in August?
It will be a totally different game. There was a sending off in the first minute and we scored from the resulting free-kick. It was tricky for them from that moment on.
We watched the game against Fleetwood and the game against Portsmouth and they are well versed at what they do. They are not for the purists and I’m not sure you would want to play in those teams or pay to watch them.
But they are getting results and they are fighting for their existence in League One and they have made a good fist of it since Dino has gone in there.
There are many ways to skin a cat and what they are doing at this moment is time is effective for them. It suits the personnel they have and I think they will unashamedly be proactive in continuing that frustrating, antagonistic approach in our stadium on Saturday because until injury time, it almost worked for them at Fratton Park.
We know it will be a tough game and we need our fans to support our lads and be patient because it will be a completely different game to Tuesday night in terms of we will have a lot more of the ball. They will be camped in a deeper block, trying to frustrate and make it difficult for us and it might take us until the 90th minute to break them down.
Is there any light at the end of the tunnel in terms of people coming back from injury and being available for selection?
No, we’ve had a couple with illness. We’ve got four ill this morning, so we could be lighter on bodies rather than getting them back, so it is what it is. We’ll have a team and we’ll be ready to go.
Lewis Gibson is back in training. Was that training with the group?
He’s back in. We had a lighter day because it’s a three-game week. Maybe he wouldn’t have been had it been a normal training day.
He’s making good progress but it probably comes too soon for him to play on Saturday.
Have you had any conversations with James Belshaw since Tuesday night or has it been straight back to work?
We had a good chat on Monday and we left the office shaking hands no problem. He’s come in and trained so there is no issue.
You asked me a question on Tuesday night and I answered it honestly because I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t. If I try to say something else, it looks like I’m trying to hide something and I was completely transparent with you because that’s the way I live and breathe.
I think it’s important understand sometimes how it is from my perspective. I have to look after the whole group and make sure the standards for the whole group are maintained. If you have one player disappointed and maybe it affects his training performance and his attitude, what happens next week when I name a team and it’s somebody else?
You have got to be careful in this game because you encourage what you tolerate.
Honesty underpins your coaching ideology…
Life.
So to survive at Bristol Rovers, you need to take the honest truth from you and I guess the people that haven’t aren’t here?
I live a life of radical honesty so why would I coach any other way. It is not genuine for me to be any other way and that brings with it difficulties for sure because people say ‘Just tell me the truth’.
As we know, most people can’t handle the truth.
From what you say, it seems Kieran McKenna has misinterpreted what you said to him after the game. Can you get across the point you meant in that conversation?
I just went to him at the end of the game and said ‘Sorry we couldn’t take you on’. That’s what it meant, I wasn’t apologising for the way we played. I thought we were excellent in our strategy and really got the best opportunity to win the game by going the way we did.
We were far from parking the bus. It was a mid-to-deep block with some triggers we felt we could catch them on and expose them higher up the field.
To be fair to Kieran, he’s probably worried about four wins in 15 with a £15m budget in League One and Sheffield Wednesday and Plymouth pulling away and Derby, Wycombe, Barnsley, Bolton and the group chasing closing in on them.
He’s a man under pressure. I could smell that on them and I knew that before with the results profile. It was part of the reason we went with the strategy because they were nervy and on a run of drawing a lot of games and finding it hard to break teams down.
I was apologising and I do apologise to our fans that tune into this. I don’t want to sit and counter teams, I want to be in the middle of the ring, the middle of the pitch, with the ball taking the game to teams.
But sometimes you have to cut your cloth accordingly. Our budget is three-and-a-bit million, theirs is £15m. If we take them on – and we went to Portman Road earlier in the season and had a right pop at them and tried to take them on – in the moment we’re in in our stadium, we would have been gifting them points and that is not our football club.
We had to make a plan for that and I apologised for sitting to counter. I don’t want to be a counter-puncher, I want to be in the middle of the ring trading blows with you, but I guarantee you if the boot was on the other foot, he wouldn’t be attacking me with a £3m budget if I had a £15m budget, that’s for sure, and he wouldn’t be drawing 0-0.
The games against the Burton types this season, particularly at home, have been a real challenge for you because there has been a lot of time bled off the clock and tactics from the opposition that maybe have got under people’s skin and it has affected performance levels. How do you condition your players for that?
Well these are better at that than anybody else in the division. It’s tough because it should be the officials.
There is a huge issue in football with the speed of play. I thought the officials on Tuesday night were really good, superb. They kept the game flowing and made it a good encounter.
But the MK game before that, we had the ball in play 21 minutes in the first half and 23 minutes in the second half. On average in a 90-minute game in the Prem, it’s 58-60 minutes maybe, but at our level it seems to be less. You are getting in a 40-minute realm and that’s too much.
What can we do about it? Yeah, we can put more ball boys in the stadium, but it’s over to the officials. The officials have got a job to do and part of the game is keeping the game flowing.
It is frustrating for players and if you can get away with it, why would you not do it? If you can go to an opponent’s stadium and do that, why would you not do it?
Again, it’s the officials that have to drive that. I know there is a big initiative from the referees to try to get more viewing time in the actual game instead of people watching the ball to come back in.
Tuesday was perhaps the best defensive structure you have had all season, but it’s different playing in a low or mid-block closer to your own goal. In this game, you are going to be on the halfway line with a lot of ball and the different challenge will be the distance between your backline and the goal. This is a very different game and a very different defensive challenge.
We’ve got to win on Saturday but we didn’t have to win on Tuesday, Ipswich had to win because they need to win to keep pace.
It’s kind of like a European cup first and second leg. You don’t go away from home and blow the occasion out of the water in the first leg.
You go away and you have your strategy and you try to get it back to your stadium and have it on a cup match feel.
For us, it’s almost like we have done the first leg on Tuesday but we have to win the second leg at home on Saturday against a completely different outfit. They are going to sit in, they are going to frustrate.
You’ll see it, he sends the substitutes out to antagonise your guys if they have got a throw-in that side. Every trick in the book, they are up to.
It’s part of the game and we have to accept that. They will try to frustrate our fans, they will try to slow the game down and take the energy out of our stadium.
It’s a sign of respect and a massive complement because if you are better than us at football, you don’t need to do any of that. Burton have to do that because they have discrepancies in the footballing quality and their ability to control a game of football.
Josh Coburn was on the bench on Tuesday for the first time in a while. How did he react to that?
He’s fine. He’s got a little bit of a knock in his knee.
I spoke to him and said how young players come in and play a lot of games. Josh has played a lot of minutes and sometimes you need a breath to reset and go again.
As soon as I found out he had a bit of a niggle around his knee area, we were not going to have a lot of the ball in the Ipswich game because of the strategy we were employing. We thought Aaron was better to spring that counter-attack, knowing we could bring Josh into the game later on.
He accepts he is part of the group, part of the squad and he’s played a lot of minutes. He understands it’s a squad game and he’s a top kid and a top pro.
He got on with it. He was disappointed because they all want to play, especially the big games, but he channelled it in the right direction.
Antony Evans was very good on Tuesday. Is that where the bar is for him now going forward?
I thought he was really good last Saturday as well and I’m seeing signs from Evo of being Evo, going past people and taking shots, being more aggressive.
You forget he is a young player. He played a lot of games last year and has gone up a level.
He’s working on a tough strengthening programme to make him able to impose himself a bit more.
Sometimes you don’t just get better. You get the odd player that does that, but most are a little bit up and a little bit down. The key is the dips aren’t too bad.
Evo has kept turning up and kept scrapping, even in the midst of maybe not playing his best football this year. He’s still been out on the training pitch every day putting the work in and now he is starting to show signs of the great player we know Antony to be.
Tuesday night, he had to show a different side by digging in and being a lot more disciplined, but I’ve definitely seen some of the signs of Evo capturing his top form again and, certainly in recent weeks, his work rate for the team has been first class.
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