Billy Mitchell closing in on appearance milestone at Millwall – still remembers ‘headless chicken’ debut

Billy Mitchell is two games away from notching up 100 appearances in a Millwall shirt. And the fact he has tried to work out the earliest he could reach 200 games indicates he has no inclination to move on.

The 21-year-old midfielder’s performances for the Lions this season make him a strong contender for their Player of the Year award.

It is also likely that other clubs have been watching Mitchell, who has been a mainstay of Gary Rowett’s side since the start of last season.

He could reach his century when QPR visit The Den on February 11.

“It will be something I’ll be really proud of, even if it feels like it has taken a long time,” Mitchell told the South London Press. “Had it not been for the hamstring injuries then I think I’d have racked it up a bit more quickly.

“I was trying to work out how many more seasons I’d have to do, at the going rate, to reach 200.”

Mitchell made his debut as a late substitute at Wigan Athletic on the final day of the 2018-19 campaign.

“Up until I had made my first 30 appearances I could tell you every single one, in order, and who I played,” he said. “The more you play, you just can’t do that any more. It is still very vivid. I can still remember the kind of feelings, how exciting it was just to go and do the warm up. I remember the boots I was wearing.

“It does feel like a different lifetime, to be honest. What has brought it back a bit is having Zach (his younger brother) going through a similar thing recently at Charlton where he has made his first few starts. All the things he says to me when he comes home, and his experiences, does bring it back. You do forget the things you feel and see the first time you are around it, they are things you take for granted now. So that’s been cool.

“When we played at Wigan I was just charging around like a headless chicken. I think I fouled Antonee Robinson. I remember running back to the halfway line and Ryan Leonard shouting: ‘Oi, come back here – hide, so you don’t get booked’. Then he jokingly said: ‘Millwall fans will love you forever, now’. Weirdly, somebody saying that really helped settle me down.”

Millwall are only outside the play-offs on goal difference after their 1-0 win at Cardiff City last weekend.

“It was gritty, it probably was not pretty,” said Mitchell. “They had a good amount of chances in the first half and in the second half – fair play to our defence, they were really excellent.

“That was the kind of performance which shows what you need to do well in the league. On another day they could’ve scored although we had the [Jamie] Shackleton chance towards the end.

“We stuck together, ran hard and tried to land on as many things as we could. The subs who came on did really well – heading and clearing everything away.

“It was one of those where you could almost feel the tension on the pitch in the last few minutes thinking ‘please just don’t concede’. I didn’t feel like we were going to. It felt like one of those games where we were going to do whatever we had to do in order to get the win.”

So is play-off talk banned between the players?

“It’s just an unwritten rule that if you talk about it in the changing room then it gets jokingly frowned upon,” said Mitchell. “Almost a case of ‘watch your mouth – we’re nowhere near it yet’. There’s obviously a long way to go.

“The league is crazy. Two bad, or even average, results and you can slip straight down to mid-table or worse. But the other fact is that if you’re playing teams in and around you then you can create a bit of space. If we can beat them it can put us in really good stead. Sometimes we’ve won and not really moved anywhere.”