Joey, it’s not that long ago you were playing some good football and you won at Cambridge a few weeks ago. Is there something you need to get back to doing that you’ve gone away from a little bit? What do you think the key is to getting back to where you were?
I don’t think we have. The little spell we are in now, it started in the second half of the Cheltenham game. We were so dominant and gifted a goal away and managed to hang on and win that game even though we had some good defending and goalkeeping to thank for it.
Against Cambridge, we found ourselves a goal behind and managed to get in a winning position, albeit in the second half against the wind we didn’t have a shot.
Then we go to Accrington and the referee alters the course of the game with his decision for the first goal. We have a game postponed in the midst of that and we have a bad afternoon where everything kind of goes wrong at Morecambe and then we’re 1-0 down after two minutes on Saturday and they score again late.
It’s just one of those moments. When you have been in the game as long as I have, you understand there are ebbs and flows. Sometimes, you’re fortunate and win 7-0 on the last day of the season or 4-3 at Rochdale, and other times everything you plan for kind of goes out of the window because everything runs for the opposition and things go wrong.
You have to keep your head in the midst of that and understand what you are doing.
For me, my learning as a manager is to simplify it. This week has been a lot lighter than it would normally be, mainly to just try to de-clutter the lads’ minds and get the new lads coming into it and understanding who they are working with and what type of people they are.
Also, you are trying to get them to integrate into our team and our culture as quickly as we possibly can and Saturday for us is just about getting into the contest and doing the basics of football really well. One of those is ‘Don’t concede a penalty after two minutes’.
We’re aware of where we are. We were in a great spot; eighth in the table and looking up and trying to chase that pack down. A few poor results can alter that a little bit, but we’ve got to remember there are lots of games out in front of us, lots of winnable games and that starts with a winnable game on Saturday.
You are one win away from the whole picture changing. We’re lucky that we’re in League One because pretty much everybody can beat everybody. There are some times you draw Man City and you go ‘OK, we’ll take a point there or keep the scoreline down’, but in League One, you don’t have many sides that give you that kind of feeling.
Outside of the top three in the division, and even them when you look at them, you don’t lose sleep over any of them.
You have given them all good games and even the past three you have lost in the league, your possession has been absolutely fine. What you want more is the penetration. You haven’t created as many chances as you have for the rest of the season.
We have had 1,750 passes in the past three games and 11 shots on target. The lion’s share of them were in the Morecambe game, as well, so it’s frustrating.
We try and play and I do get when teams are low on confidence, which ours is at the moment, or you have got new people coming in, it can throw you out a little bit.
You have to understand like anything when you are building something, sometimes it gets a bit worse before it gets better.
The January window should have been a strengthening window. As it was, it wasn’t, it was a firefighting and getting-bodies-in window. We lost a starter in our team in Bobby and that was compounded by losing two other starters in Jordan Rossiter and Lewis Gibson.
At this level, losing three starting players, it is very difficult to maintain momentum and also the lads are already knocked in. From Bobby’s perspective, he made a lot of mistakes in our team and you hope the lessons learned from them help you over the course of the season. As it is, he’s gone to Barnsley and they will probably pick up – he’s already scoring for them so they have already picked up the upside of that.
But that is the industry and that is the danger of taking loan players because you are never really in control of the situation.
But for us, we’ve got to keep building and the job is constantly a moving target in front of you. Your job is to stay in the division and you have a slow start, and then you are delighted to have a good middle ground and all of a sudden you’re like ‘We could get promoted here’ and there is a promotion chase on and you are looking up there, and the next minute you have lost three games and slid down a snake.
I know two were away, but they were three winnable games for us. The disappointment of that is felt by everybody in the group.
When it’s a younger group, they maybe feel it a bit more and they are a bit more emotionally volatile than a more senior group would be. But on the other side of that, I see it that it makes me a better coach. I have got to find another way of coaching another group, finding another language to spread through the team.
Once it starts to get underpinned with performances, performances naturally lead to results.
You look back and go ‘OK, it’s another learning curve for me as a coach’. It’s frustrating, it really is because I just wish I could coach it once and it stays there, but the reason either your hair falls out or goes grey in this job is the difficulty of every single window.
But we are in a good spot. We have got 37 points on the board with 17 games to go and lots of winnable games in those, lots of good teams to come to the Mem and we’ve got loads of the ball at the minute so we just need to learn to shoot and keep the ball less and shoot a bit more.
You talk about confidence. With your midfielders and defenders, is it having the confidence to take the chance force a pass every now and then or try to penetrate the lines to give the strikers a chance to get the opportunities?
Yeah and you have just got to go through this process with them. I have been involved in teams that have been really poor when you’re not very good at football, you don’t create many chances and you have a habit of conceding sloppy goals. It is usually a recipe for disaster.
We are really good at keeping the ball. We don’t really know at his moment in time in the past three games where we have got to risk it. We have gone some way this week to establishing that.
The other side is we have got to get a bit more defensively organised and structured.
They are all things we can control, but you would think if you get people in a good position, they would naturally understand that is where they need to take shots from, but at this level you have got to do a lot more than the level I played at. You put someone in a position and they realise they have got to get open and take a shot down the pitch.
Our lads will keep the ball because they need to think we are keeping the ball to take a shot down the pitch, we are not just keeping the ball. Explaining that to lads is the job and if it was simple, you would only have to do it once but we all know that it’s a Sisyphean task.
On the defensive side of things, the reverse fixture between the two clubs was one of those where you didn’t have very many defenders and it was kind of why it ended up the way it did. You will certainly be looking for a much tighter effort at Sincil Bank.
It was a great game last time. We lost 6-3 and you were scratching your head about how we lost it. We felt we had as many good chances as them and they just seemed to really capitalise on everything they did.
We were worried, everyone was worried about how open we were, but if you remember at that time we were quite confident about what we had coming and we felt we were a better side than what we showed in the opening gambit.
Same again, we have had a bit of a wobble with the results. We’ve got a couple of people to come back in and impact key areas who are competent players in those areas and settle a lot of people down.
We’ve also got some new blood in the team and some fresh ideas and impetus. Everybody at the minute is just a little bit safe, playing with a little bit of fear because that naturally happens if you don’t win games and we have got to try to coax that out of them and get them to go and express themselves.
For us, the Lincoln game is winnable. They are a good side, they have got a record at home which is they don’t win an awful lot at home, but they don’t lose a lot. It’s a tricky place to go in terms of it will be a decent crowd and I think we have got to go there full of confidence and belief that if we are more aggressive with some of our riskier balls, we’ll be fine.
We can keep the ball and that’s evident, but in the game you don’t get any goals for passes. If you did, we’d have won the past three games, so we want to control the ball, but you have got to get the lads to understand we are only keeping the ball to get this platform to take shots down the pitch. You have to go through the process.
Joey, in the past few weeks do you believe there has been a regression in the tactical understanding as well as confidence and you have had to take things back a couple of steps to go forward again?
So I’m now doing exactly what I did at other junctions when you lay the system down because we’ve got new players and they’re young. I am in the process of laying down a system that is understood by everybody. How quickly that gets understood will determine how quickly we can move to the next level and the next level and the next level.
We’ve got a lot of new ideas and new people in certain slots and, unfortunately, you want to get to progression number six, but unless we get one, two and three right, we’ll never have a hope of getting there.
You have to let it unfold. If you are winning games and getting results, you can scale that up quicker. At the minute, you feel like you’re going root and branch through everything.
This week has been a real resetting week in terms of we were doing some of the build-up and progression stuff. That’s why we’ve been able to keep the ball, but because we haven’t added the final ball and the quarterback passes – the shots over the backline to it – the lads have got to that point and then kept passing it and not taking it down there.
In the midst of that, we still feel we’re not getting the defensive structures that we like, mainly from the front and middle part of the team, so we have shelved the passing and progression stuff. Some good work has been banked by the lads but we’ve had to shelve it in terms of it doesn’t flow naturally up the chart.
We’ve gone back to laying down systems and the foundation. That work we have already done will be banked against that, but we need to take more opportunities to get into the opposition’s final third and more opportunities to cross the box and service the front side of our team.
It’s all good and well having 500-600 passes, but it doesn’t really bode well unless it leads to shots on target or shots on goal.
So would you say to your players ‘I would rather you gave the ball away playing progressively than turning around’?
I would never advocate giving the ball away. It’s about playing in the right part of the pitch.
You can complete a pass and we have completed lots of passes in the past three games and it doesn’t lead to anything.
It is the argument of possession over position. My belief is that position is more important than possession because if you have got the ball on the goal line, I can press you and I don’t need the ball. You only have to make one mistake and I have scored.
But you do need the ball, so it is finding the balance of where do you want to control the ball and where is the right part of the pitch to maybe lose control of the ball? When you risk it, you lose control of it and it is about being really controlled in certain areas and allowing for risks in others.
First prize is we get you in behind, second prize is we win the second ball or at least compete for the second ball because then we are predictable to each other.
There is stuff we have got to work through and the only way you get better is on the training ground and in the midst of that you have got games to play and games can ebb and flow with confidence.
We just want to get back in, get these games coming. We’ve got three games this week coming up and we want to get stuck back into it because the sooner we start winning, the sooner everyone will start feeling good and smiles will be back on faces and we’ll start enjoying our football again.
Thinking back to the previous poor run you had going into October, I remember that Exeter game and it wasn’t your flashiest performance but you were dogged and you stayed in that game and you grew into it. After that you have Cambridge, again not your most fluid performance, and at MK you got the job done. The fluid football built from there, do you think that’s what you need to do? Just give yourself a chance and no penalties in the first two minutes?
Yeah, absolutely. The first shot on goal and you’re behind. It’s a penalty and it’s tough for the keeper.
It’s tough because teams have got something to hang on to and naturally the whole stadium is affected because goals change games. That leads to players’ confidence being affected and you end up getting sucker-punched chasing the game late.
But you come out of it going ‘OK, we’ve got the ball, which is a start’. If you have got the ball, you can do something about it.
We have to get a bit smarter and cuter in terms of what we do with it, but again it is just the ebbs and flows of a season. You go and turn in a good performance on Saturday and pick up a good result or a good performance and everybody is filled with optimism again and then you’ve got a bit of a free one on Tuesday night because Ipswich are riding near the top and they will have to win the game, I would imagine. I think drawing at their stage is not going to help them close the gap on Plymouth and Sheffield Wednesday, so it’s a little bit roles reversed in terms of the pressure.
If you’re in our position, we’ve got lots of good fixtures coming up. We are in a good spot in the table for a newly-promoted team. Could it have been better? Yeah, absolutely.
We are building a new group again. We have got a lot of young people in the team and it’s exciting as frustration creeps in. It excites me because it helps me develop as a coach and I’ve got to go through this process again with other people.
You are constantly refining the message and hopefully in 10-15 years’ in time when you are coaching at the elite level, all of these different stages of team-building that I’ve been through over my five years as a coach now will stand me in good stead because I’ll probably have done this 25 times by then.
The midfield looks like an area where one or two lads need to put their hands up and take ownership. How has Lamare Bogarde trained? In Jordan Rossiter’s absence, you need someone to put their hands up and do a job in there.
He’s a very good player. We’ve got a lot of bodies in there and a lot of good players, we just haven’t found the right combinations since Jordan has been out.
We’ve tried a few different combinations in there. We have gone from a two to a three and we just haven’t managed to find that right combination.
Jordan being out, there’s nobody who quite does what he does, so whichever junction we went to, we were going to be doing something slightly different in there.
There is more than enough quality in those central areas to not only get on top and win the battle in the engine room but also get in the box and help either create or score goals.
We have got to bed a new group in. For me, it’s about settling Luke McCormick into the group fully, it’s about getting Antony Evans firing on all cylinders. In the midst of that, you’ve got your Paul Coutts, your Glenn Whelan, your Sam Finley and your Grant Ward in there, who have that bit of experience and know-how.
It’s about getting back to what makes us a good side and getting the front side of our team serviced. If we’re having 500-600 passes in our half up to the halfway line, our front lads are going to be bored as they have been in the past period.
They have been the real bright spark in our season. We must service them, we have starved them of supply routes because we have been intent on keeping and progressing the ball.
As the coach, it’s my fault, it’s what we’ve worked on. You are trying to fix one problem and the thing is if you go away from one other thing, the players’ focus at these levels is very much what’s in front of them.
You get what you demand and you encourage what you tolerate. We have got to get better.
Lincoln dusted us 6-3 at our place and we think it will be a different game, albeit we know it will be a tough game because they have got a lot of draws at home, but if we’re at it and play as well as we can, we can beat anyone.
Speaking about the players upfront, Josh Coburn has had a quieter few games than he has experienced so far. Obviously, he has had great lines of service from Aaron Collins in particular. It doesn’t feel like he is getting much change out of referees at the moment as well as the service not going his way. Do you have a role to play there or is he fine?
That’s what he’s here to learn and you have got to understand with young lads, they ebb and flow. When they are 28 or 29, they go and put a good season together, but it’s very rare that you see a young player taking a level of performance and being consistent over a whole season.
I don’t think Middlesbrough would have sent him here had they thought he was the finished article and he was ready to play well consistently for a season.
I think he has been a victim of us overplaying at times and being too safe in possession, but no doubt if we create chances, he will put them in the back of the net because that’s what he does.
His shots-to-goal ratio is as high as anyone in the division. What we’ve got to do now is create more opportunities for him to get shots because he has proven he is a goalscorer and a finisher.
Collins can do a bit of both. He’s a scorer and an assiter, but Josh is a goalscorer and you see that in the way he plays that position. For us, we have got to get more service to them.
Will you have Antony Evans and James Belshaw back in the squad this weekend?
Antony trained, but Belly hasn’t trained with the group today. I think he’s alright, though, he’s had an injection. He may be able to train tomorrow, but he didn’t train with the group today although he was out on the grass.
He may train tomorrow, but I think he will be fit for Tuesday if selected. Let’s see what happens after this weekend’s game, the next one is key.
Evo has trained today. He has got a bruise on his foot and they can be really painful at times, especially if they get on your bone. It’s on his right foot, as well, which he utilises more than his left.
He trained alright today and I think he’ll be fine unless he has a reaction overnight, but I think he’ll be OK.
The two longer-term ones are Lewis Gibson and Jordan Rossiter. What is the latest with them?
He had to have a procedure on Monday, Jord. He had a bit of fluid and he had to get it tidied up.
He had an operation in December, came back and had a setback and had to go back in and got an operation on it again. Then he had the fluid come up and he had to get it cleared out and tidied up.
We’re hoping that is everything sorted out for him now and he’s back on the road to recovery. They think there will be games for him (before the end of the season) but if there is another setback it will probably put him out for the season.
But he has still got a chance of playing a part in the season. How long is a piece of string at the moment? We have got to see in the next couple of weeks if it has cleared up.
That was a bit of a blow.
Lewis is back out on the grass and is not a million miles away, so that is a real positive.
Is Saturday too soon for Lewis?
Yeah.
Tuesday? Next Saturday?
I don’t know, it depends on who you ask. He’s on the grass but he hasn’t joined in with the group yet.
He’s been on the grass for about a week now but we have got to be mega careful with him. The key is we get him back for most of the season.
If we were two points outside of the play-offs, you might start rushing him back, but we will play it by ear. He is chomping at the bit to get back, but a week Saturday might be too soon.
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