‘I’m not one for milestones’ – Gary Rowett clocks up three years as Millwall manager

Gary Rowett has clocked up three years in charge of Millwall today but the experienced boss says he pays little attention to those kind of personal achievements.

The 48-year-old Midlander is the second longest-serving boss in the  Championship with only Coventry City’s Mark Robins having a longer tenure.

“I’m not one for milestones,” Rowett, who has won 60 and drawn 46 of his 153 matches in charge, told the South London Press. “I’m not one for ‘I’ve done this or I’ve done that’. We just quietly go about our work.

“We’ve had to endure a little bit of noise this year with a few people unsettled among the fanbase but what we’re hoping is we’ve continually worked and proved a few doubters wrong.

“You let your team hopefully do the talking on the pitch. At the moment, with the results we have had, they have certainly done that.

“I just get on with my job and crack on with it. I’m too busy going up and down the motorway and ordering train tickets to worry too much about how long I’ve been somewhere.”

Millwall face West Brom next in SE16 tomorrow and Rowett has underlined his side must stay grounded after an impressive 3-0 win over Watford on Wednesday.

“Watford were level on points going into the game but when you look at the players they have available you don’t look at them as anything other than a top-six team,” said the Lions chief. “That is what you have to do – you have to respect their quality.

“You have to respect their individual players. Liverpool were trying to buy Ismaila Sarr for £40million not so long ago.

“It is the same with West Brom. If Millwall start looking at games and thinking ‘well, we’ll win this one because we’re there in the table and they are there’ – we know it doesn’t work like that.

“Where they are in the table makes them probably even more dangerous and we’ve got to make sure we’re even more on our game and at the races, in the same way we were on Wednesday night.

“Anything less than that sort of performance and we won’t win the game. We know what we are and what we’ve got to do. We’ll let other teams worry about where they are in the league but we’ll respect West Brom for the good players that they have got.”