Joey Barton wants Bristol Rovers to be "incredibly brave" and take control of the ball at Portsmouth on Saturday after erring from their strengths in defeat at Barnsley in midweek.
The Rovers boss believes overcoming the atmosphere and surviving the opening moments – things his team failed to do at Oakwell – will be essential for them to get a positive result at Fratton Park. Pompey have had crowds in excess of 17,000 for both of their games so far and Barton has tasted the atmosphere there as a player and as a manager.
Barton called on his players to learn lessons from Tuesday's 3-0 reverse in South Yorkshire, where they were two goals down inside a quarter of an hour and never mounted a meaningful reply.
Two days later at Thursday's press-match press conference, he sent a clear message of how he wants his team to approach the game against a Pompey side tipped for promotion this season. He wants the Gas to be brave and commit to the possession-based style that earned promotion last season after describing some of his players as "rabbits in the headlights" at Oakwell.
"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," Barton said.
"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.
"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 didn’t play our game and that is the most frustrating thing.
"We ended up pumping it long and trying to 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."
Danny Cowley's side are unbeaten in four League One games this season, with the 4-1 victory over Cambridge United on Tuesday their second of the campaign.
Former Pompey striker John Marquis spent two and a half seasons with the club, scoring 36 goals in 121 appearances from 2019 until January this year when his contract was terminated to facilitate a move to Lincoln City. His spell at Fratton Park was mixed, peaking with an 18-goal return in his second season, but he was often maligned by fans after signing for a seven-figure transfer fee.
The 30-year-old, who opened his Rovers account with the winning goal against Oxford United a six days ago, would doubtless love to get the better of his former club, but Barton is flirting with the idea of returning to a tried and tested formula – with top scorer Aaron Collins playing as the central striker – on Saturday.
"I’m not sure what we’ll do in terms of our team shape at the moment," Barton admitted. "I’m not sure whether John starts in terms of (Sean) Raggett and (Michael) 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."
But once the game gets underway on the south coast, Barton says it is crucial his players – regardless of who starts – knuckle down and frustrate the home crowd.
"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," he concluded. "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."
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