It was a very different competition on Tuesday and obviously you were able to make a few changes, but getting that win and the positivity around the group, that’s got to mean something?
Yeah, it’s always nice to win games of football regardless of the opposition. You’ve got to get to winning ways and there were lots of lads who were desperate to get minutes who maybe have not got the minutes in the league campaign and they were keen to show us what they can do.
I thought it was a relatively mature, professional performance from the lads. Lots of agendas for us in terms of getting people minutes coming back from injury. There were lots of ticks in those columns for us and to get that winning feeling back and to get the win in our stadium is always nice.
Specifically, with the injured ones, you had to be careful and they got 45-60 minutes. Does that put them in contention to start at the weekend or do you still have to be careful?
We’ll just take it as they come out of the game. Most of them have come out of the game really well, they’ve trained well again this morning and it puts them in contention for the matchday squad.
Whether they start and play, do I think they will be able to jump in and go right into 90 minutes? Probably not, it might be a bit early for some of them, but also that doesn’t mean they can’t play 45, 60 or whatever’s required.
It’s nice to have those options and it drives competition in the squad because the training group now has got a lot more quality in there and the standard is just getting nudged on and getting higher and higher, and that tends to drive performance.
Defensively, you’ve had more than a few headaches this season. You will have more of a different kind in the weeks coming up as they keep coming back and you’ve got more players to choose from than you’re used to.
Yeah, they are the kind of headaches you want and I’m never going to complain about having options in certain parts. It does bring with it the problem of keeping the squad happy and managing the people within the group.
But I am desperate for those problems after what we’ve been through. I’m will be really delighted to have them, hopefully, approach us in the next couple of weeks.
You got to see Josh Coburn up front for a little bit in a proper match rather than just in training. He looks like the kind of player who can make a really big impact over the next few months here.
Yeah, he’s a young lad full of enthusiasm and I think he complements what we’ve got in the building really nicely. It was nice to get some minutes into him on Tuesday and to put him together with Ryan Loft for 15-20 minutes, just to get a feel for each other because we want to be playing with a front two.
I think we’re more effective playing with a front two and we’ve got Aaron Collins, John Marquis and Harvey Saunders as well, so we’ve got some good options in those areas. Josh comes in and gives us that new signing feeling, even though it is October.
Nice for Sylvester Jasper to get a real proper runout and there were some good flashes.
I think he’s shown in all his cameos he gives us something different, a creative winger type that we were looking for and I thought he was really good in the first half. I think he was a bit quieter in the second half but I think he certainly showed just what qualities he can add to our group.
Going into this weekend off the back of the draw at Exeter and playing so well without getting the win there, it helps to build what can be a bit of momentum.
We want to get back to winning ways and Cambridge will be tough. They’re a solid group, they know what they’re good at and they play to their own strengths, but they are a side we know if we play well against we can cause problems.
We’ve got to get back to winning ways and Saturday’s game for us in front of our fans in our stadium is a good opportunity for us to do that.
You’ve had quite a few games at the Mem with teams that will sit deep and try to soak up pressure and frustrate you. Is that something you’ve tried to work on in recent weeks in terms of breaking those teams down?
No, not so much. I think when you’ve got your strong XI out there and they’ve got familiarity with each other and teams sit back in, you build a plan for taking advantage of that.
It has actually surprised me. Usually, as a newly-promoted team, teams don’t come to you and sit back, so I suppose it is a little bit of a sign of respect for our fanbase. Maybe to take our fans away they come with a defensive mindset to slow the crowd down and you heard Jesse Marsch and Steven Gerrard arguing about it at the weekend.
This is maybe what got lost a bit when fans weren’t in with COVID, but it’s the premise of any game of football at any level. If an opponent has got a boisterous crowd that can be a 12th man and give them energy and drive them on, it’s natural for the team visiting to want to take that off them.
We’d be wanting to do the same if we went anywhere with a relatively big crowd, so I don’t knock any teams that come here and have done that. It’s up to us to find solutions for it.
For us, it’s the trickier part of the game, but as I say, we’ve got to find solutions. I think back to the League Two campaign last year when we would go against teams who would go down to 10 men and we would really struggle to overcome it. It was only through it happening a couple of times that you end up finding the antidote for those problems.
With our lads, we’re a constant work in progress and for us, it’s another team we feel we can beat in our stadium after picking up a good point last week. We are disappointed that we never took three and we want to build on that momentum.
Joey, Nick Anderton has confirmed this week he has had his operation. On behalf of the club, you must be delighted he’s made that next step in his recovery from his cancer diagnosis?
Yeah, for sure, and it puts things in perspective. Sometimes you don’t realise how lucky you are just to have your health.
I know a lot of the lads are around Nick and he was on the phone to everybody yesterday coming out of the surgery. I think he was a little bit high as a kite based on the medication they gave him.
He’s a top kid, Nick. You work all your life and you dream about being a player and Nick’s in the prime, 26 and improving. He joins a club and gets that promotion under his belt and he’s looking to the future and then he has some horrendous news in pre-season and life is flipped on its head.
For us, it’s all about supporting our teammate and our friend and doing the best we can for him. I think the medical people at the club have been absolutely first class in terms of the speed in which Nick’s cancer was identified, the speed with which he’s been to see the specialist and the speed with which he has had the operation and now he can get on the road to recovery. The main thing for Nick is he is going to watch his kids grow up.
We’ve all got to be there for him and I think the football club and the football community have been superb in getting around Nick and we’ve got to continue doing that until he’s fully recovered.
He clearly means a lot to you. I sense your door will always be open to help him?
Absolutely, and if it turned out he couldn’t make a playing comeback, then I’ve been on to about getting into this (coaching), start studying set-plays. We’d always create an opportunity for Nick because you’ve seen the bad news he’s got and the way he’s responded to it.
I have nothing but admiration for him and the way he’s responded to the dreaded C-word. At that age, it would put the fear of good in you and he’s a better man than me in terms of his handling of it.
We’re lucky in terms of we’re a close-knit group and the boys are in constant daily dialogue with Nick and he probably feels as part of the group as much as he possibly can, albeit he’s lying in a hospital bed in Birmingham overcoming from what is quite a dramatic surgery for a 26-year-old man.
How big an inspiration is he for the group? It puts a lot of things into perspective as well. You may be 50-odd days without a league win, but that doesn’t really matter, but it also gives you a purpose to achieve something beyond just wanting to do well for yourself.
Nick is really close to all the lads. He is a real fulcrum of our squad dynamic here; one of the big conduits for everybody is their friendship with Nick because he’s such a likeable lad and the group has really felt that.
It does get lost sometimes in terms of you’re trying to get results and you feel sorry for yourself if you’re on a run where you haven’t won for 50 days in the league or whatever, and then you’ll get a reality check because something will pop up, whether you walk past the dressing room and you see Nick’s name on his peg or we’re in the stadium and Tom Foley has Nick’s jersey there.
All of a sudden you get a reality check and you realise. Football is important, Bill Shankly famously said ‘It’s not a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that’, but in reality, I think we all know there are a lot of moving parts in being a human being and for us, we must never lose sight of how lucky we are to have our health.
You feel sorry for yourself, maybe you haven’t trained or played well, but the fact you’re able to get out there, I always say to the lads ‘Nick would kill to be out here, imagine what Nick would sacrifice to be able to just pull the jersey on and have a bad game.
For us, he was a huge person in our dressing room and the minute we can get him back in whatever guise, we will find a role for him because he is a top fella and all of us are desperate to see him chipper and back on his feet.
Onto more trivial matters, it has been a better week on the pitch, but I’m sure you recognise this is a different challenge. The game on Tuesday is not really an accurate barometer for a League One game that really matters, and the Exeter game you were on the road and tailored your plan to deal with them, whereas you’re probably going to have to be more proactive on Saturday, aren’t you? You’re at home and the crowd is always brilliant, but there has been that nervousness creeping back in for the past two or three games at home.
Results breed confidence. Draws are great, we turned a defeat into a draw. We turned a victory into a defeat on Saturday with two moments of madness and then we turned a defeat into a draw.
If you can’t win them, then you mustn’t get beat and that’s the first stepping stone. We lost three or four on the spin going into that, we were in a position to lose the game when the board went up for stoppage time. The lads pulled themselves an equaliser and got back in it.
That transitioned into a lot of rotation in the Tuesday game to get minutes on the board. Obviously, the lads have gone and won a game, albeit we know it’s not the league but it was a competitive fixture we had to fulfil.
Then you bounce into the real stuff on Saturday in terms of your bread and butter, the league campaign, and we need to get a win on the board, get our third win of the season and get moving in the right direction.
For me, I want to win every game. Am I more nervous than I was last year? No, because if we drew a game at this point last year, our promotion charge was affected. It’s pressure in a different way.
But it’s a lot easier trying to stay in a division than it is trying to get out of a division, that’s for sure. Cambridge are a side that I think towards the end of the season will be delighted to secure League One status, similar to us, and we’ve got to see it as an opportunity to take three points.
We’ll be disappointed if we don’t win the game and, naturally, if you’re not firing on all cylinders there is going to be nervousness and angst in the stadium. We’ve got to start quick, start bright and help our fans relieve their anxiety.
Control is something I know you traditionally look for in your teams and maybe you haven’t had so much of it this season. But looking at Cambridge’s numbers, they score pretty freely. Are you expecting that basketball vibe to the game?
They’re similar to Exeter. They are relatively quick from front to back, they’ll test you in the physical department and they’re slightly different in that they do it with a 4-2-3-1 as opposed to 3-4-1-2 as Exeter did.
But in League One, if you’re not at it and you’re not competing and winning your duels, no matter who you play against, it will be a tough fixture.
We’re in our stadium, we’ll have our fanbase with us and we must get them engaged by starting quick and getting that vocal support and energy from them that we know that they can bring for us. But if we start slow and Cambridge execute their game plan better than ours, the nervousness and angst will naturally creep in the stadium.
That’s normal in every football stadium around the country. You see it at Anfield last week, 2-0 down to Brighton and you can hear the groans and moans from the crowd. If that’s happening to Liverpool, who arguably have the greatest supporters in the world, who back their team at every junction and Jurgen Klopp’s feeling a bit of pressure and the players, then how can Bristol Rovers be immune from that?
We’ve got to take care of business by winning games of football. If we do that, naturally the crowd get with the team and supports them superbly.
Josh Grant and James Connolly, are they any closer to coming back?
No, I think Josh is going to require an operation. He’s had a further setback and he hasn’t even made it to us. He’s still got a bit of an issue and it’s been scanned and he might need a bit of surgery in the knee.
It must be incredibly frustrating for Josh. When you’re a good player as he is, it must be soul-destroying to keep having niggle after niggle.
We’ve just got to help him through that, support him and hopefully, he will turn a corner someday.
James Connolly is back on the grass and joined in the warm-up with the boys this morning. He’s not quite joined in with the group in terms of the full-contact stuff.
He’s been out for six weeks now and he’s going stage by stage. Hopefully, in the next 10 days, he’ll be back doing full contact and joining in with the group and that brings him into the selection dilemma.
Going back to Josh, is there a timeframe that the operation could rule him out for?
He’s seeing the surgeon today in London, I think. After he has a discussion with him, we’ll probably know a bit more on the timeframe.
Josh is out of contract in the summer and you forget he is 23, he’s still young, and we hope this is the thing, the operation that sorts everything out for him and away he goes, but we’re in the lap of the gods on that and the surgeons and physios will deal with that and take it from there.
We’re desperate to get him in our team because he’s such a good player and I can’t imagine the level of frustration and disappointment there must be for him because he’s had a lot of setbacks in my short time here and I think he’s had a lot over the course of his career.
You had quite a few knocks picked up on Tuesday. You said Alfie Kilgour was in concussion protocol, has he been cleared from that yet?
He didn’t train today, no, so he might be out for Saturday and that’s disappointing. I’m not 100 per cent sure on Alf but I think, from what in was told yesterday, Saturday is going to come too soon for him.
He’s had a bit of a tough spell, gets a goal and gets booted in the head. You’ve got to be careful now with head injuries. When he’s getting dizziness in the dressing room at half time, you have to be very careful with it and if he has to miss Saturday’s game to protect his long-term health, then so be it.
John Marquis and Sylvester Jasper took kicks as well.
Jasper is fine, he trained this morning. John has got a bit of a knock that we need to monitor. Hopefully he trains tomorrow and comes into contention
Finally, is Harry Anderson still having time off or is he back in contention?
He’s trained this morning and I think he’s come through training fine. We’ll assess him in the morning but he will come back into the matchday squad.
He had bruising in his right foot and when the pain medication wore off, it was really gnarly for him. He’s alright.
Joey, Chris Wilder has been sacked by Middlesbrough. Does that affect Josh Coburn’s loan spell? Do they have a recall option in January?
I think they always have a recall option in January, but because we took him and he was injured, our understanding was we’d get him for the full season because we’re going to help him through his end stage with him missing for a month.
But who knows, if a new manager gets appointed and he’s part of their plans, the parent club will pull rank, so for them to do that, he must be doing well and scoring goals for us, so we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it in January.
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