Millwall get shot at start of 2023 of recording a first Den victory since October

BY ALEX GRACE

Gary Rowett highlighted the importance and significance of Millwall’s home form after the Lions’ 0-0 draw with Bristol City on Thursday night.

The stalemate was the third consecutive draw in SE16 after both Hull (0-0) and Wigan Athletic (1-1) left South London with a point.

The Lions boss was also keen to reinforce the message that the Championship’s competitive nature means no two games are ever the same. The South Londoners beat Watford on Boxing Day before Thursday’s stalemate with the Robins.

The Lions have the chance to pick up their first home win since the World Cup break against Rotherham today. Should they be successful, it will be seven points taken from a possible nine over the Christmas period.

“If we go and perform against Rotherham then we have an opportunity, and that’s all it is, to win two and draw one in the week,” said Rowett

“Rotherham will do the same [as Bristol City did]. They will come and make it hard. They will work hard. They’ll make it physical and they will make it hard for us to do what we want to do. We just have to keep improving those little nuances in our game, improve those little bits of our performance – try and add a bit of extra quality to it in January, if we can, and just keep working as hard as possible to stay at the top end of the league.

“There are a lot of good teams with good options. The fact we are up there, I think we should be quite pleased.

“If you look at our home form so far, we are virtually two points a game at home.

“We’ve only lost two in 12 games. Our home form, in terms of points, winning games and not losing games is excellent. The last three games, we’ve drawn all of them. We’ve just not found that fluidity. Whether that is the break or losing a little bit of rhythm, I don’t know. Whether it’s teams coming and playing a bit deeper at times, that’s fine we have to find a solution to that.

“After the Watford game, the season isn’t going to go smoothly all the time, you’ll get performances like that [the 0-0 against Bristol City], when we will be pleased, and then we might get little blips like this one. But we’ve taken a point, it’s another clean sheet – we will need to move forward and certainly play a bit better in the next game.”