Joey, it was a rare setback on Tuesday. Are you confident the lads will respond in the right manner this weekend at Portsmouth?
Yeah, I’m hoping so. They always have, certainly in this calendar year, even if we’ve lost a game.
I was saying to them earlier that this was the first game in the year that we’ve lost that we had no chance of winning. Even if we’ve been beaten in the past, we’ve always been in the game.
It harked back to the dark days of the early part of my tenure here when we were struggling to get results and struggling for confidence.
For me, we’ve gone away from it, we always reflect and review and upgrade. At this moment in time, we feel there are things we could improve on as a group.
We feel there are things we didn’t do that have given us the 18 wins in the calendar year so far and we must get back to doing those things at Fratton Park on Saturday.
And presumably, your players are in credit and you don’t think about wholesale changes for Portsmouth on Saturday?
No, and I don’t have the luxury to be able to do that either. But we’re at a 50 per cent win ratio in the league. We’ve won two and if we keep that up for the rest of the season I’m surmising we’ll be alright.
We’ve got to get back on the horse as quickly as possible at one of the hardest places in the division to respond.
But I’m looking forward to it and hopefully we can meet that challenge.
It struck me that the last time we were at Portsmouth, Rovers were relegated. It’s a very different Bristol Rovers now, isn’t it?
A different feel, for sure, and we’ve got to work really hard to make sure the club is never in that position again. That was a horrible day that we went down with a whimper, it wasn’t nice at all for everybody connected with the club.
We go there this time on a slightly different ebb, even though we’re coming off the back of a disappointing performance last time out.
There fans will be out in numbers and the proximity of the stands to the pitch always makes an atmosphere at the stadium and we’re hoping to give our travelling fans something to shout about and a real positive performance, as far from that performance on Tuesday night as possible.
Portsmouth are desperate to get out of League One and they have started the season well, haven’t they? They’ve got a striker who cost several hundred thousand pounds, Joe Pigott on the bench. What kind of test will they be for your players on Saturday?
I think they are a really good team. Solid components and a solid back four with Joe Rafferty who was at Preston, Ogilvie who was at Gillingham and Raggett and Morrison who they took from Reading, who will win predominantly all the aerial balls and give them a set-piece threat.
Marlon Pack will be the playmaker, Tom Lowery we were looking at ourselves and he’s going to be a bag of energy in there.
Whether they go Dale, Hackett or Jacobs in the wide area, I’m not sure. Curtis will be the other wide player who is a maverick and that kind of X-factor for them.
Then it will be Colby Bishop, who has had a great start to his career there and either Pigott or Scarlett, who played against Cambridge the other night.
They’re not going to change for us. They will be 4-4-2, 4-3-1-2 when they’re squeezing the pitch down. They do all the basics really well, they defend the set-piece superbly. They attack you from your set play, they attack you from throw-ins, they invite you to throw the ball back and press it.
We’re going to have to be the best version of us to take maximum points, but again we’ve got to show a completely different level of performance. It’s all well and good talking about it, but when that whistle blows on Saturday we must execute.
It will be a game John Marquis is looking forward to, buoyed by his first Rovers goal on Saturday, taking on his former club in Portsmouth.
If he starts. I’m not sure what we’ll do in terms of our team shape at the moment.
I’m not sure whether John starts in terms of Raggett and Morrison, who will look for someone to have a scrap with, so I may well go as we did last year and play with a false nine in there and so something different.
They will find out when they see our team sheet on Saturday, but John will play some part in the game for sure.
We talk about starters and finishers and we’ll have a plan for starting the game and we certainly want to make some impact off the bench in the last part with the boys who will be going on to finish.
This season you’re allowed to bring on more subs and on Tuesday you brought on three at half time. What was the thinking there and are they in contention for this week?
Yeah, to get minutes on the clock for some of them and change what was a poor first-half performance from us. There were some tactical components to that and the managing yellow card situation component as well.
I felt it was one of those games where you are 2-0 down and you might as well try something different and always in my mind is you sometimes lose a battle, but there are 46 games and you want to win the war.
The game on Tuesday night went away from us, we made a few tweaks at half time. They scored again early and at that point it was a case of getting out of here with as many wins as we can, although we know we’re not going to win the game. That was nobody getting sent off, nobody getting injured and people getting minutes on the clock and also us looking at a slightly different tactical footprint.
Talking of team news and injuries, anyone back on Saturday? Josh Grant, for example?
Josh might be back for Saturday. Hopefully he can get through the rest of training. We’ll see how he is in the morning but he probably comes into being in contention for being on the bench, rather than being in the starting XI.
We only had Josh missing from the game the other day, other than James Gibbons who we know about long term. He’s going to be a while yet.
Hopefully Josh can get back into the matchday squad again. We’ve just got to police him through this tricky period on his body.
On transfers, it’s looking like you’re going to be right about August 30-31. It doesn’t look like there will be any new faces in the building for Saturday, does it?
No, we’re scrapping away and working on it. I know the players I want to take, it’s six players, but whether I get them or not is another thing.
There are other targets as well, but yesterday we said ‘OK, they are the boys we want, can we go and take them?’
Some will go to the dying embers of the window because that is the way their parent club at the minute want to keep it. Others will be loans and you will be waiting on ‘OK, this player’s back fit now, so he can go out on loan’. Or next week’s round of League Cup ties. Players are being kept in, we’re told, to play in the League Cup for their team and then they will come back out.
I’m hoping to get stuff done as quickly as we can, but you can only do it as quickly as it presents itself.
Does six remain the target?
Six remains the target, for sure. That’s giving our recruitment team a bit, but I’ve been vocal about that the whole time.
If we get five I’ll be happy, but if we get three I’ll be p***** off, if we get six, I’ll be buzzing.
Clearly identifying who they are is the key and at the minute there are a couple of them still moving because whether they stay in or out at the club is a different thing.
But we’ve pretty much firmed up the ones we want to take, it’s just whether they want to come and sign for us now.
Joey, when you reflected on the Barnsley game you said you had to play their game and engage in the direct battle. Is this game different because Pompey have got that dominant presence at both end of the pitch?
We’ve got to play our game. I don’t think we played our game on Tuesday night. We got caught up in the conditions and got caught up in playing their game.
We got caught cold early on and just never settled in the game. It was a real off night across the board. You’ve got to dust yourself down and come back stronger.
We didn’t play our game and that is the most frustrating thing. We ended up playing f***-it football, where you just pump it long and get the second phase. That works for some managers and there are many ways to skin a cat in our game, but we haven’t built the team for that. We’re a footballing side, we’ve got good football players.
That’s on me as the coach. I go out there and we ask them to do certain things and if they don’t execute, it’s your responsibility as the coach.
We’ve all got to be better and we’ve got to be braver. We go to Fratton Park and we’ve got to play football because we’ve got good football players.
It’s going to be an experience for your young defence against the likes of Colby Bishop and Joe Pigott. They are rounded centre-forwards, but they are battering rams as well.
We’ve played against them before at Accrington and at Wimbledon. They’ve got some good players but so have we. We have got some really good players as well and we’ve got to find a way of imposing our game on them.
When you watch them, they are good at lots of things and they are a good side, but also like everybody else there are vulnerabilities and if we play their game it’s a toss of a coin and the likelihood is it will be like Tuesday night and they will beat us because they are better at it than us.
If we play our game, we’ve shown we’re a good side. We’re better fighting our fight than their fight.
Is there a sense of having to retrain the mentality of the group this season because you have to realign your expectations of what the league is going to do to you sometimes? In League Two in the second half of the season, if you dropped any points it was damaging, whereas this year you can have a very good season by going win one, lose one, win one, lose one.
For us, it’s more about imposing the way we want to play. That’s the key for me.
I think if we do that as we did in the end in League Two – at the start of the season we couldn’t impose ourselves, barring Oldham, in the first 10 games and we were getting what happened on Tuesday night, getting pinned in and we couldn’t function and we didn’t get results and we had to find a braveness and a style of football that suited us. Once we found that, we gradually built and started to get confidence and belief in what we were doing and that momentum carried into the back end of the season.
We’re going to do exactly the same here in this division. There are going to be some tough moments where we don’t get it right like Tuesday night and that is a challenge, but we’ve got young players in certain areas and we’ve got to learn those lessons and come back through it.
To do that, we’ve got to play our football that we practice. We’ve got to not get drawn into a game of basketball with other teams because it doesn’t suit our players and it doesn’t suit the way we want to play.
You don’t win 7-0 and 4-3 the way we do by pumping it long and winning the second phase. That isn’t going to work for us. It might work for loads of teams in the division, but we don’t have the skillset in our players to do that.
Our players are footballers so we need to take the ball on Saturday. We’re going to need to be incredibly brave because we’re going to need to go into their house, take the ball off them and own the ball.
After getting beat 3-0 at Barnsley, that isn’t easy to do, but that’s what we’re going to do.
Fratton Park reminds me of a golden era of the Premier League, that mid-2000s era. What of your memories of playing there?
A great stadium, a really good atmosphere. When you drive in it feels like you drive into the end of the world, it just closes in on you.
One of the good old-fashioned football grounds. I know they’ve done a bit of renovation work to spruce it up a little bit, but the proximity of the pitch and the atmosphere that can be created by 15,000-20,000. It’s not like 50,000 but sometimes they can make it really raucous and make it feel like there’s a lot more there.
On the other side of that, I’ve been there and seen the adverse effect of that crowd so we’ve got to go there and not allow them to feed their crowd.
The way they’re playing at the minute, they’re going to be baying for blood and expecting three points from Pompey against a newly-promoted team. We’re going to have to go in there and be brave and disarm the crowd and use it against them.
You used the phrase ‘rabbits in the headlights' on Tuesday. You’ve got to be different, haven’t you, by being proactive and quieting the crowd in the first 10-15 minutes?
For sure, you’ve got to do that in any stadium that you go to, whether that’s Crawley on a Tuesday night or Pride Park later on in the season. You are going to have to absorb the energy of a crowd, the same way teams try to do when they come to the Mem.
We’ll have a strategy for that, but our way of doing that is by controlling the football and if you control the football, you make them do the stuff they don’t really want to do, which is stressing the backside of the team out.
That will lead into a bit of angst in the stadium and then all of a sudden you get the opportunity to use their crowd against them, or like Tuesday night when you give them a leg up and a goal early on in the game, their crowd can then be used as an extra player against you.
We’ve got loads of lessons to learn on this journey this year. Handling big-stadium atmosphere is going to be one of them. We didn’t do that particularly well on Tuesday night and we must do that Saturday if we’re going to be successful.
SIGN UP: To receive our free Rovers newsletter, bringing you the latest from the Mem
READ NEXT:
