Joey, did you learn anything about your squad and players after the opening day of the season against Forest Green?
Yeah, we felt we were in a certain position. We were hoping for a nice surprise and we didn’t get that. We also didn’t get a real shock, which we could have got.
The group was kind of where we thought it was at. I think if we had a couple of extra bodies, I’m very sure we wouldn’t have lost the game. It just felt like we ran out of energy and legs towards the end of the game because Jordan Rossiter has had a disrupted pre-season.
He played on in the game with a niggle and it looks like he’s going to miss a couple of games now because he pushed himself into the back end of the game. That’s where if we had the reinforcements you’d have been able to manage the load of players.
We’re in for a bit of a tricky spell until the window closes and we get the requisite bodies in, but for me you’re learning all the time in terms of watching your group. There were some really good things and there are some things that are non-negotiable for us and we’ll have to adjust them.
It’s an area of pitch where you last need an injury. Sam Finley, could he be available this weekend?
Sam has trained today, so hopefully he comes back into contention but you’ve got to be careful rushing him back. You rush him back and you lose another player.
Paul Coutts is one game closer to playing and will be one more after Saturday from last season’s suspension, but we’ve got to get the squad together so we can manage the load of all the players and safely navigate the group through.
But Sam comes into contention and that is a nice option.
Presumably short term, players like Zain Westbrooke continue to get opportunities?
No, I’ve got to clear the decks, really, so I've decided that some boys who haven't got a future here, there's no point dragging it on. We're short at the minute but we keep turning to guys who aren't going to have an impact in our group and I'd much prefer to open the pathways for the next crop, the next generation.
While those senior players are around, you lean on them, because you go, 'okay, it's better than throwing the kids in at the deep end'; Saturday's game for me was a kind of line drawn in the sand in terms of cleaning out the group.
We've lost three players this week who won't have a future with us: Alex Rodman, obviously, Trevor Clarke and Zain Westbrooke.
I just don't think it's fair to carry them on down the track with us when they're not going to be part of our future and that allows us to bring seve young boys across today from the academy who are raw, are young but are full of potential and I'll much prefer to give those guys the reps than keep turning to people, for no fault of their own - they're all good lads, they just don't have the skillset that I require for us to move forward.
To be clear, they’ve played their last games for Bristol Rovers?
You never say never, but I've told them all to explore the market and find new clubs and with the two young boys, I could keep them in, but it's just not fair on them. They're probably going to have to drop out of the league and into non-league, I think Jamie Egan has done that at Hereford before. Sam Heal has come back of an ACL last year, he needs to go and play men's football. He doesn't need to be hanging around our training ground.
Rodders has got decision to make what he wants to do, but he's reported for pre-season injured after having the whole summer off and then hasn't been with the group for six weeks. At his age, with his record of games, if he missed pre-season, it's tricky for the rest of the season, especially when we're stepping up a division and the intensity goes up. I just felt it was an opportunity to clear the decks.
I made a mistake bringing Trevor Clarke back, I shouldn't have brought him back, I should have really known that from last year but I gave him a chance and he hasn't managed to take it.
Zain is a top kid, I really want him to do well, but it just hasn't worked at Rovers and I can't keep turning to him because Jerry Lawrence doesn't get minutes if Zain's about, because you would naturally go to the more experienced boy. I don't think it's fair on Zain and sometimes you just have to draw a line under it and got to help them boys move on and find new clubs.
Will you be afraid to throw any of them in on Saturday, these youngsters?
We’ve got a couple who did well in pre-season like Malik (Sesay) and those boys who have been in a bit longer, but I’ve got to see them at the training ground because we don’t have our academy here.
If you’ve got seniors hanging around, you’ll make up numbers with the seniors and sometimes it’s staff members and when they’re like Whelo and Mangs, they’ll jump in.
I want the young kids getting the reps because that is the only way they’ll know what work they’ve got to do.
It’s tricky for me because safety is keeping hold of those players, but every time I turn to them I very quickly run out of trust and confidence with them because they don’t make the most of the opportunity. At least with young kids, if they go in there, at worst they’ve got some experience.
With senior players, I think a few of them are waiting for stuff to go wrong. It can be OK for 20 minutes, Zain is a prime example of that.
At the minute, the fans don’t fancy him. That is the reality. He’s a good player and a good lad, it just hasn’t worked for him here and no matter how much we want it for him, I think it’s time for a clean break.
I said what I said after the game and it’s harsh, but that’s the reality. If we look back last year if you spoke to anybody involved with Rovers last year and said ‘The first game of next season, Westy is going to start’, you would have gone ‘Well he hasn’t been playing for Stevenage, what’s gone on? Has he had an incredible summer?’ They would be questions levelled at us?
It’s just not fair on Zain. He’s wasted two or three years of his career here and sometimes you need a fresh break. We’ll help him as much as he can to progress his career because he’s a really decent kid, he’s not done anything wrong but I felt I had to take a drastic approach and separate the wheat from the chaff.
Does the target remain six to seven new signings before the end of the month?
With Trev going now, that will probably make it eight, but we’ve got some quality in the building and I know from last year and from my time coaching, it is just one or two players and before you know it the group looks markedly different.
We’ve got a good foundation to build off, we just don’t have enough of them at the moment. But luckily, we’ve still got 20-odd days in the market and things are progressing.
Whether they progress quickly enough to have people in the matchday squad, I’m not sure, but were certainly down the line with a couple of players and a couple of loan players.
We’ve mentioned options in midfield, how many options do you have at left-back?
We’ve got no recognised left-back, so our left-backs are Harry Anderson and Gibbo, who’s played there for Port Vale and we’ve had a trialist in today who is a left-back and has done exceptionally well.
The problem for us is there is a Premier League club in for him as well. I think it is for their under-23s programme, so we can offer first-team football and we’ve just got a few bits to check and obviously speak to agents and agree salaries and stuff, but it looks an improvement on what we had before.
Finally from me, there are still 45 games of the season to go. You’ve only played one game. Burton lost 3-0 on Saturday, what kind of game can we expect this weekend?
Have you watched the Wycombe vs Burton game? The ball will be screaming, the ball probably won’t meet it’s good friend, the grass, for much of the game judging off that. I’ve still got neck ache and I’m going to get the physio to put one of those thinks you get for whiplash from watching it.
It was a very direct game between two direct teams. Jimmy’s teams are always physical, they always examine you. They’re a big side, especially with Oshilaja, and they tend to play centre-halves in midfield.
They will be 4-2-4. They’re very aggressive, they move it from back to front relatively quickly. They’ll have watched our game and said we’ve got a young backline and maybe not all the components of the backline.
So I imagine the gameplan for them will remain the same. I don’t think with the personnel they’ve got they can do much else.
It will be a tough game because it looks like they’re fighting to keep the manager in the job, certainly on the run they’re on Jim will be feeling the pressure.
I already feel under pressure after losing the first game. I think it’s natural for all managers if you get beat because we’re all perfectionists and we want our teams to play as good as they can.
It will be a game where we’ll have to stand up. A young backline will have to stand up and be counted, but we’ll learn.
The good thing is we’ve got people in the building now who are going to go forward with us, through hell and high water. We’ve cleared out the building, the lads who have unfortunately not made the grade.
Joey, you said about Trevor Clarke and that you ‘should have known’ from what you saw last season. Can you specify what you’re referring to there?
He’s a good kid. He just can’t play the position how I want it played. Last year, we didn’t see a lot of him due to his physical state.
He came in this summer after the back end of the season and he got the bit between his teeth and he was saying he really wanted to get after it in the summer and the off season. He’s come back in and he’s had a lot of reps because we’ve been light in that position with Josh (Grant) being unavailable.
For me, he just doesn’t fill me with trust going forward. If I’m honest, I don’t trust him. I don’t think he’s the right component for us.
We want to pass out, we want to play, and he’s not that type of full-back.
Unfortunately, we extended his deal and sometimes you’ve got to be very quick to recognise and I hold my hands up. I’ve made a mistake on that one, I shouldn’t have brought him back in.
If I had my time again, I wouldn’t have done that, but we have and we’ve got to find a solution, firstly for Trev and, obviously, for the club.
I don’t think he’ll have a problem. I think there will be many suitors for him. He’s obviously done well in the League of Ireland and he could pop back out there, but that will be somebody else’s problem and he won’t go forward with us.
A word you mention there is trust. On Saturday, you were talking about turning around and seeing the bench and half of them are players you don’t trust. Does this force you put your trust in a Jerry Lawrence, a Ryan Jones, on a matchday?
The good thing with young players is they will learn through the experience, the baptism of fire, so at least if they don’t quite get what they need, they’ll know the work they’ve got to do.
With a Westy type, they’re just kind of waiting for everything to go wrong. He’s like ‘The minute I make a mistake, the fans are going to turn on me and the gaffer’s going to take me off’.
Unfortunately at the minute, the confidence levels are lower than a snakes belly and it’s tricky to instil that in them. They have to work through that and at some point you just have to say ‘How many opportunities is somebody going to have?’ and how many times are they going to have an opportunity that’s going to be taken away from a young player who may take that opportunity with both hands, as Hooley has shown?
I’ve got to create pathways to get the next generation through and if you’ve got, and I keep going back to him, I feel like I’m caning him but I’m not, but if you’ve got Zain there, because they’ve got league experience you naturally turn to them as it’s just the safer option.
When they’re not there, you look who’s next in line, a young kid and let’s get them that bench experience and knowing that will stand us in good stead going forward as opposed to somebody who is likely to leave the club in the near future.
From your perspective, how do you think the group has responded to the events this week? Has it lit a fire under them? Has it put them on notice?
I think like in everything, a cull every now and then is good, so you have to cull the populous and that usually happens at the end of the window or at the end of a season.
I think everyone here was going ‘Am I coming or am I going? The gaffer’s talking about six or seven signings in’ and all of a sudden you get in on Monday and they see three people leave the building. Amazingly, everybody settles down because they’re like ‘I’ve made the grade’.
When we speak to the lads, we say this is the group we’re going to go forward with. Yeah, we’re short and we’re going to keep adding to that, and yeah there are some young kids here but we want to try to get them some more experience, and experience for them sometimes is just training with the first team, but if you’ve got five or six senior players hanging around they’ll join in and the young kids stay down at the academy.
I feel the group has benefited from it. It’s just settled the group because everybody who is here now knows they are really fancied.
I’ve been telling Trev all summer ‘I don’t trust you, you’re doing stuff in training, you’re not doing what I’m asking you do to, your retention of information I’m struggling with because how many times am I going to show you?’ He’s not 17 or 19, he’s 24 so at some point the penny has got to drop and after doing a year’s worth of work with him last year I just got to the point where we need to pull up stumps here and just draw a line under it.
It’s not fair on him because he had a similar theme at Rotherham where he’s not played minutes, he’s had a similar theme here where he has not played minutes.
He could go back home. His family is in Ireland and he could probably play in the League of Ireland, he’s probably got enough ability to play there. He might get another opportunity in England, I don’t know.
But putting someone in the team like Westy and Trev, who you don’t trust, is not fair on them. We have to put them in because we’re light on bodies and they also know that you don’t trust then and they also know that their fans don’t trust them.
I haven’t been there when the fans don’t trust me, but I’ve seen players where the fans don’t trust them. Your first impression is everything as a player, so if you start off well and then you have a bad game after 10, fans go ‘He’s a really good player, he just had a bad game’. If you don’t start off well, you’re a really bad player who has just had a lucky game.
That’s why hitting the ground running at football club is so key because once you earn the trust of the players, the staff and the fans, it can account for you having a poor game every now and again, but if you don’t and you’re injured all the time or you’re hit and miss when you play, everyone’s trust in you evaporates and when that happens it’s very difficult to turn around.
That’s where Azza is such a bright light because the lads were on him last year, Whelo was on him because he wasn’t good enough, but he made it though. He knuckled down and found a bit of form around the December period and he made it through that baptism of fire.
I didn’t get him through it, he got himself through it.
I think we’re all in agreement about Zain. He’s had so many opportunities, the amount of times under other managers as well and it just hasn’t happened for him here.
He’s not a bad player and not a bad kid, but at some point you’ve just got to remove him and allow young players to come in and have an opportunity.
It’s been a month today since you signed a player, John Marquis on July 4. Do you envisage things will start moving quicker, is there a possibility anything could get done before the Burton or Crawley games, or are you still in this waiting phase where you’re trying to sift out value?
We’re not waiting, it’s just where the market is at. If you know anything about the window, there is really good value at the start of it, and there is really good value at the end. In the middle, you just get stuck in auctions.
Loads of people are still spinning plates and we’re a long way out from the end of the window and it’s tricky to navigate it.
The money, Wael’s not said no. The owner is ready to go, Tom Gorringe is ready to go. There is no financial thing holding it up, it’s just we want to take as much quality as we can.
You’re waiting on people who are being told by clubs higher up the food chain than us that they might come for them, so they might be waiting for a Championship option. I think usually with those guys, they’ve got four or five options and once they take one then everybody knows they’re not getting it and all of a sudden they say ‘I’m ready to come into League One’.
That might be 24-48 hours to go in the window and you have to be patient.
For us, the aim of the game is to get to 52 points on the board and staying up. Last year, we had to get the group in because we had to get promoted and we had to hit the ground running.
We do this season to stay up, but I look around lots of other teams and I can take players now, but we’ll get better. We’ve got to improve the group, we can’t just bring players here to pad the squad out.
It’s not fair on those players and it’s not fair on our players because we worked really hard to get in the division. I promise you we will have more than enough to stay in the division and we’ll have a really good squad.
How early we get them obviously gets us off to a better start, but if after six or seven games and the window closes, if we’ve got six, seven, eight, nine points on the board, that will be a competent start. If we get more than that, great. If we get less than that, obviously we’re playing a little bit of catch up.
But I’m confident, based on some sides above us who have been in the division before, who are in a death spiral like Fleetwood and Burton. They’re in a death spiral from last season. Yeah, a new manager has come in and they have a couple of new players but since December they are used to getting beat.
We played Forest Green the other day and since December both of us have just been used to winning games. That habit of winning is so key.
Going to Burton’s stadium is a huge opportunity for us. They’ve lost a lot of games. In pre-season, they lost a lot of games and they’ll be feeling that. They’ve lost the winning habit and we’ve got to pounce on that.
We’ll be playing a really attacking lineup, right out of the gate. We’re not going there to draw, we’re not going there to batten down the hatches, we’re going there to fully take them on and take maximum points and that will be the outlook all season. We’re getting after absolutely everybody and the stronger and stronger we get, which we will as the market presents, the better the group will get.
Finally, can you just clarify what Jordan has done with the injury?
He felt a little bit of a twinge in his hammy in the in-house game. Due to shortages, he felt fine and just being the lad he is, he knew state of play and he just pushed on.
I think if the game would have been in a slightly different phase, he may well have been able to make a substitution, but because we were trying to win the game, we didn’t have that many options.
I asked him during the game if he was feeling alright and he said he felt alright. He’s just tweaked something so it’s not doom and gloom.
But if we had three more subs we would have put a senior on. I’m kicking myself now that I didn’t put Whelo on, but because we were chasing the win and we were in the ascendancy with the four strikers on the pitch, we decided to leave it as it was.
When it comes off and you win a game, you’re a genius, but when they score and their lad produces a moment of quality you look back and think ‘Should we have done things differently?’
If Sam would have been fit – but they’re all ifs, buts and maybes – we would have taken the load out of Jordan. But it was absolutely necessary to get the maximum out of that game.
He’s not available for Saturday, but we’ll have to find a different solution to get a result and we’re going to play a type of football we haven’t played. We’re not going to be as expansive and as fluid at passing through the phases as what we’ve been in the back end of last year, but that’s the way we want to play. I don’t want to play a bit more direct, but we have to play that way to give ourselves the best opportunity.
If I know Jimmy’s team and Burton quite well, they won’t have any qualms about getting a lot more involved in the direct stuff and we’re going to have to deal with that.
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