Hi Nigel, how are you?
Good thanks!
We’ll start with team news, how is the squad shaping up for the weekend? Max [O‘Leary] went off injured on Sunday, how is he coping?
He won’t be available this weekend. That’s an opportunity for Dan [Bentley] to come back in, it’s unfortunate for Max but that’s the way it is.
What is the injury with Max?
He had a dead leg and a heavy knock on his thigh that’s got some swelling. He’ll be out this week.
That’s the bonus of having two very good goalkeepers…
Yes, very much so. We know what Dan can do, he’s a very experienced goalkeeper and I’ve said before that we’re very lucky to have two goalkeepers with a lot of ability and different qualities too. He comes straight back in.
Max aside, does anybody come back in that hasn’t been available in recent weeks?
We’re more or less as we were. We don’t have full availability of course but players have trained well this week and it’ll be a tough game but we’re looking forward to it.
Having had the week to reflect on Swansea, what do you now think of the game and the season in general?
In the same way. We continue to cause ourselves problems and from being in a winning position we end up losing the game through poor errors. I haven’t changed my stance on that.
Will your team selection on Saturday reflect your disappointment?
You’ll have to wait and see, won’t you. I don’t believe in broadcasting what I’m going to do and the selection process is always done with what is best for the team. It’s as simple as that. Individual’s egos don’t really come into, I’m afraid.
Have the players communicated with you about Sunday, and how important is communication to improve your defensive record?
Players are very aware of what our problems are but unfortunately we’ve got a lot of players that are at full tilt and have been all season so they are sometimes found wanting in terms of quality as much as anything. It’s not a case of looking for a different way of framing it because I’m talking to the media. We are where we are, and that’s pretty straightforward in my eyes.
We’ve had some good performances, we’ve had some good real development within the squad with individuals this year but of course we’ve got some important players missing that give a bit more balance. Those things together mean you’ve got to be a bit more creative with how things are with selection for instance.
It’s difficult to freshen up when players are going through a tough time and they’re not capable of dealing with it. We don’t have too many options but I’ve said to you before, players have to play through it and that in itself is quite a big ask for some of them.
We’ll do as we always do. Prepare as well as we can, hopefully play with a freedom that we’ve also shown in the past two or three months, the team has played really well even if the results haven’t always reflected performance, but that’s life.
How important is it that you don’t lose the freedom and attacking flair?
I’m not going to mess with areas of the team which are functioning well. No chance. I’m not weakening where we’ve been very strong just to try and fill gaps in other areas of the pitch, no, I’m not doing it.
We’ve scored four less goals than the whole total of last year Jon [Lansdown] told me. We are certainly a more potent force but unfortunately we are not tight enough and haven’t been so that’s our Achilles heel I’m afraid.
Would you consider giving minutes to Duncan [Idehen] and Robbie [Cundy] instead or do you have to be careful with them?
You’ve just answered it, you have got to be very, very careful and I think it’s not just about giving youngsters opportunities. A part of my job is trying to judge the challenge for youngsters so I think it would be unfair to blood players in, when the team is not getting the results we want.
For instance, last season at the end we had no alternative and so for a number of our young players they made their debts and did well for the most part but it is a risk and you can sometimes do damage to young players by exposing them at a time that’s inappropriate.
It's a choice we’ve made to go with a smaller squad and one of the real positives of the season is our younger assets are looking like very good assets so don’t underestimate that.
Middlesbrough under Chris Wilder, what have you made of them, one defeat in 13 under, what challenges will they provide you on Saturday?
They’ll attack a lot down their right-hand side. They play similarly to Sheffield United when Chris was there. I know Chris pretty well and he’s a good manager and he’s got them moving in the right direction, absolutely, so it’ll be tough but I think Chris will expect it to be a tough game for his team too because we are a very capable side so it’s important that we play to our strengths as well.
Selection might be an interesting one this weekend but I shan’t be divulging it but it’ll be an interesting decision making process this weekend.
It’s a special day for the club with the Ashton Gate Eight in attendance, what does that mean to you?
I’ve read up quite a bit on the background of it as well. Hopefully I’ll get to meet some of them tomorrow (Friday) if the storm coming in doesn’t prevent that. Both sides actually have a very similar story, Middlesbrough in 1986 and ourselvess in 1982 came very close to liquidation which is a very sobering thought.
I tend not to think of it as a celebration, it’s more of having an appreciation of what our history is and how close we were to basically folding.
It wasn’t a straightforward process for the guys involved, it was a difficult time for them individually.
The money in football today was certainly not like that back then but it’s a huge decision for all of them to make and we can be very, very thankful for what they did and that’s really what it is. It’s important that we show our appreciation in public and I would imagine both sets of fans will see the poignancy behind what happened.
We’ve got to concentrate on the game as well so I’m looking forward to meeting the guys but that apart it is focusing on the match.
When you said players playing at full tilt, what do you mean by that?
To give you a greater understanding of what I mean by that, players playing without experience of this level on a regular basis is something that I am conscious of, not to make allowances for but I am aware of what the potential pitfalls of that are.
Players like Rob Atkinson who’s had an interesting route to the Championship and this is his first year at this level and players who are very accomplished to playing at this level it’s easier to cope with the demands of it. Or less weariness on a psychological level.
I think for the most part our players have dealt very well with what the situation is. What we have not been able to do is secure the number of points we should have done by now. We’ve spoken a lot about that throughout the season. It’s a part of it that I as a manager have ro factor in and it will have an influence on the recruitment moving forward.
As in bringing in more oven-ready players?
Yeah, there’s got to be changes this summer. This is going to be an important window for us. It’s the next one that opens so it’s going to be important that we strengthen in the right ways.
On psychology, when you mention not being able to install desire in players, are there any tools that can help that?
There’s loads of tools that can help in psychology and I’m not a professional psychologist but anybody in a leadership or management role is a practitioner of psychology.
I said what I said after the game and I stand by exactly what I said. What you can’t give people is a hunger and desire, and the players we do have have a real hunger and desire, they’re doing ever so well.
So some of our younger players that have broken into the side and are actually performing at a very high level consistently, that says something about not just their technical ability, it tells you something about them as people, which will be the one thing which gets them further in the game.
You will have seen over the years here with players with immense technical ability, but the one thing that will stand against them is if they’ve got a flawed character so I’ll tell you this, we all spend an awful lot of time here and invest a lot of time trying to develop the players as not just technical players but as efficient footballs. Talking to them, trying to develop different sides of them.
The bottom line is, I’m not spoon-feeding anybody because if players are always needy then at some point you’re wasting your time that can be invested in other people and I won’t dwell on that.
Even if it’s players I bring in myself. I don’t differentiate between players that are already here and players that are brought in. They either are up for the challenge and want to do something about it themselves, or they don’t. If they don’t, see ya.
Has that changed with certain players that seemed to have the sense of desire at the start of the season…
I don’t know because I don’t know what you’re thinking in that term.
I could name names but have players changed in terms of your perception of them?
Not massively no, not really. I think what you get is that I’m a big believer in giving people opportunities but it’s up to people to grasp and maximise opportunities. Our job then is to make sure that whatever pathway is open to them or is right for them is supported but what we don’t do is do it for them.
Some of the younger players that are in our side at the moment like Alex Scott and Han-Noah Massengo just to name two, I could name other players as well.
Han-Noah has been through a tough run of form where he never hid. His shortcomings as a player are not as visible because he’s prepared to keep working and his teammates have helped him out.
Players have different levels of ability but what they can still be is game effective and that comes with experience. The best coaches are players so we do have some very good senior players who spend a lot of time helping their junior colleagues out, that’s really good. We’re asking an awful lot of our youngsters week in week out but they’re up for it.
I’m not really too bothered about that and I don’t have a concern about it. I know that our assets are worth a lot more now than this time last year.
That intangible mental characteristic, is that the main reason for the defensive flaws or are they technical problems you have as well?
It’s debatable and my opinion might not be shared by all of the staff, but that’s not really important because what is important is that we continue to try and help the players to develop themselves.
My aim is not to develop players, my aim is to help them develop themselves in a structured way. We’re not the academy and once you get into the first team environment the ground rules change somewhat and the players are aware of that and they absolutely grasp it and they’re not afraid of it either and that’s not a criticism it’s just to say that in a way we have to aspire.
We do have a very good connection with our academy, I would say that for all the clubs I’ve worked with it’s the closest association I’ve ever had as a first-team manager or coach working with an academy and it’s a refreshing change.
I think the chances of us continuing to produce players is going to be good but we’ll need to because we’ve got ourselves into a mess as a football club by having a previous strategy to build within a squad and that is spending too much money and having to sell to stay viable which is bonkers.
Who does that? Now hopefully we’ll get to a point when our wage bill is manageable and we’ll still create players who will be great for us and we will at some point (sell a player), I never intend to stop a player’s long-term ambitions of playing in the Premier League but our aim is still to get there.
It might take longer than we hope but what is important at the moment is that we get the foundations right. The foundations haven’t been right.
That policy that you speak of, a lot of members of that board still remain, the Lansdown family still remain; how you want the club to run, does that chime with the board?
I’m not a control freak. Please don’t phrase it, ‘how I want the club to run’ because I’m a part of the football club. Richard [Gould] who’s now the CEO, we’re trying to work really hard and we’re trying to collaborate so that we can find the right way to go.
We don’t agree on everything and I wouldn’t want to agree on everything. What we have to do is make sure that firstly our immediate future is okay, that’s the first thing.
Then outside of that we’ve talked already about the Ashton Gate Eight and the very fact that we were nearly in liquidation and we are very heavily in debt at the moment.
We’ve got to be very, very mindful of what our future looks like in terms of the progression and the steps we take to make sure that we can be a successful team and a successful club because that’s what we want to do.
Matty James, we haven’t had an update on him in a while…
Matty’s pain free now and hopefully we’ll start to load him next week hopefully. With a bit of luck we’ll have him for the last 10 games of the season or thereabouts.
By ‘load him’, do you mean integrate him with the first team?
Yeah, sorry to use our terms. He’ll start to train in some format, to put it in the old-fashioned way.
What kind of player is Andi Weimann compared to last season?
He wasn’t fit when I was here last season so I don’t know.
I’ve worked with Andi before and I had a very brief stint at Derby which didn’t work out for various reasons but we won’t put that out in the public domain. Unfortunately Andi got injured very early on in my time there.
From what I saw in pre-season though, he is the type of player that everybody really wants in the sense that his appetite for work is incredible and what really pleases me this season for him is that actually I think he knows that his teammates appreciate him. He’s getting the rewards for the hard work and some people question elements of his game but he’s a fantastic player.
Whatever system that you play or whatever job that you ask him to do he’ll just do it. That is wow, that’s gold dust. I’ve had some players here, and one of them I got rid of, thankfully. That it wasn’t how he wanted it to be and sulk.
We talk about how a squad evolves. I don’t want energy sappers. I like selfish players that are selfish to be successful because there’s a difference between selfless and selfish and the selfish types that are just there for themselves I’m not interested in.
Andi’s having a good season, 15 goals, let’s see if he can get to 20.
Our strikers have got 30 goals between them. All the talk last summer was about signing a striker. We can’t afford and probably won’t be able to for a few years, to buy a striker that’s better than what we’ve got. That’s the problem so at the moment if you’re looking at where we need to make adjustments it’s certainly not upfront at the moment.
Whether we can keep everyone or not, that’s a different question. We’ve got a lot of experience and talent in the midfield and in the wide areas too. Defensively I am very reluctant, as an ex-defender, I feel for some of our defenders because they’re playing pretty well but we’ve been too weak collectively and as a team defensively.
Individuals have made mistakes and that’s unfortunate because they don’t go out to make them on purpose but it’s cost us quite dearly, it’s life.
Andi’s a good’un. He’s a good one.
Is it actually surprising that he’s not an out-and-out striker and he’s got these numbers?
Well he is a striker! He’s a forward, for me he’s a forward and he’ll do what I want him to do. If you want him to run in behind and play on the last shoulder then he’ll do it all day long.
What we have is quite a nice blend. Even Nahki [Wells] will score goals but for Nahki to find it difficult to get pitch time is an indication of how the others are doing because it’s not favouritism, we have players in there to do specific jobs and the blend at the moment is good. Nahki has scored two goals coming off the bench, the ability between that cohort of players is good.
Dan is coming back this weekend as well, do you think the defence will react differently to him being in goal and the different characteristics that he brings?
One of my normal answers to that would be that you’ll have to ask the players but I understand where you’re coming from. Dan’s a vastly experienced keeper and they do have different characteristics but in training yesterday and today looked fine, I don’t worry about Dan.
I think it’s important to recognise that players are different and that goes for goalkeepers too. We’ve got centre backs who might have different characteristics, goalkeepers also do.
It’s really important that Dan is able to come back into the side and have a calming influence on his teammates and that he can dominate his box which is what it’s about. He knows the job that he has to do.
You mentioned the strike-force, is Chris Martin someone that you’re keen to keep around next year?
Yeah, absolutely.
It’s coming up to a year since you were appointed in this job and you were in the stands for the Middlesbrough match, how do you measure the progress in the year so far?
Well, I’ve been here a year and aged probably five. It’s not an easy job, let’s put it like that but I didn’t expect it to be. I knew when I was coming in here, they probably didn’t expect it to be as chaotic as it is or has been.
There’s a lot to do in terms of it would have been nice to have got more wins and certainly been more difficult to beat. That irritates me so much that we (can’t) instead of losing games we scrap a draw out of.
But we’ve been unable to do that just because we don’t have that balance right within the squad or key players haven’t been available, so I don’t overthink that.
I heard a comment that we’re, I think Jon said it, that we’re underperforming and he’s the chairman so he’s allowed to have that point of view, I don’t agree with it personally, quite frankly. We haven’t won the number of games that we should have done, we haven’t got the number of points that we should have had, but we’re not underperforming.
In fact, a lot of our players are overperforming. That gives James a bit more meat on the question that you asked me about players playing at full tilt.
As far as I’m concerned progression and progress, I would like it to be about results and people in my job ultimately lose their job because you don’t get enough wins but this job is a bit more complex and so I think we’ve made really good progress in some areas and unfortunately backpedalled in other areas.
The club - and I’m talking about the club now, not the team - is still struggling to find the identity that it really wants. In my eyes it’s always about let’s produce a team which works hard and people hate playing against, but we have the talent as well.
That’s what I really want but we’re a long way away from that at the moment. The group of people that we’ve got here now compared to what it was a year ago, big difference. In a positive way.
How people look at it? Like I say he’s the chairman, so he can say what he thinks, but I don’t agree with it.
SIGN UP: For our daily Robins newsletter, bringing you the latest from Ashton Gate
