Millwall boss Rowett explains why he won’t be too critical despite 3-2 loss at Bristol City

BY ALEX GRACE

Gary Rowett admitted that it is very hard to be too critical of his Millwall players after their 3-2 defeat at Bristol City.

The Lions only had 14 fit senior players to pick from as a mixture of injuries and Covid-19 cases continue to have a major impact on their selection options.

“It’s hard to be too critical of the effort in the last two games,” said Millwall boss Rowett. “We’ve had situations where we probably could have called the game off today because of Mason – but we wanted to play.

“We’ve got to defend better than that. We’ve conceded goals poorly and far too easily and when you come to places away from home you can’t score two goals and look so dangerous with your front players and then concede three soft goals like that because you won’t win any game.

“It’s frustrating because we had the game under control and it was up to us to see if we could do the right things and unfortunately we didn’t do the right things today to win the game.”

Asked why he felt his side struggled in the second half, Rowett pointed to the fact his options remain depleted.

“They had the players to freshen the game up,” said Rowett. “They were able to freshen it up with the likes of Chris Martin and cause us problems in those areas.

“We ran out of steam and it was difficult to inject that energy into the team that we had in the first half. Fatigue set into one or two after the efforts of the Coventry game.

“But to me you come here, you need your back three and your defensive midfielder to do the job – and the job is to deal with balls in your box away from home.

“The ball can’t be crossed into our box with three centre-halves and they have a tap-in from six yards. That’s not something we can allow. We have to do that better if we want to have more consistency.

“That’s the frustration. We put in a big performance and then we take another step back. It’s quite hard to play and be so up and down at times, but overall the performance was good for 45-60 minutes. You have to do it for 90 minutes and we did not do that today.”

Tom Bradshaw continued his fine scoring run, becoming the first Millwall player since Lee Gregory to score in five consecutive league games.

Rowett said: “The forwards have looked good. Benik and Bradders have looked a real handful, I need Sheyi to impact the game a bit more, he hasn’t played loads and sometimes when you play that first game you feel it in the second game.

“Mason we’ve not had available enough at the top end of his physical ability and that can be the difference. If you can make a couple of changes in the second half then you can maintain that momentum and I knew today it was going to be a hard one, the two forwards probably would have to play the majority of the game that held us back a little bit today but that does not stop us conceding the goals.

“Three poor goals conceded but difficult to complain considering the effort of the last two games.”