‘There were a couple of moments where I expect us to be more professional’ – Millwall boss critical after win over Colchester

Millwall manager Gary Rowett was not totally happy with the performance of his side in last night’s 1-0 friendly win at Colchester United.
Jake Cooper’s goal settled the contest in the favour of the Lions.

But Rowett was critical of the centre-back’s tackle on Emyr Huws which saw the U’s player stretchered off the pitch.

The Lions boss told the club’s Recast channel: “In the second half probably only Billy Mitchell and George Honeyman looked like they weren’t fatigued, we just didn’t have that extra little bit of spark tonight.

“You don’t read too much into some of these pre-season games. It’s building the fitness and the ideas around the team. I said to the staff tonight: ‘You always get one flat performance pre-season’. And tonight, certain elements, certainly were that one.

“I don’t think they [the travelling fans] will read too much into certain elements of the performance but they’ll have seen some of the new signings. We’ll be much better than that, I’m sure. It’s part of the process.

“You have to take out the good bits and there were a lot in Tuesday’s game, two clean sheets in that as well. We take the clean sheet out of today but there were large elements of the performance we need to do better. There were also a couple of moments where I’d expect us to be a bit more professional – Coops’ tackle early on was a little bit reckless. [Mason] Bennett and Tyler [Burey] started getting involved in stuff that they didn’t need to.

“There were some desperately tired players wanting a little bit of a breather in the next day or two.

“We’ll go into Wednesday’s game knowing we’ve got a few different players who can start. I purposely left out some players out of the starting line up tonight just to gain that little bit of energy for Wednesday.”