“We’ll get stuck in no man’s land” – Gary Rowett’s warning for Millwall as he seeks more clinical touch

BY RICHARD CAWLEY

Gary Rowett has warned his Millwall side will end up stuck in mid-table if they can’t score more goals.

The Lions are nine points behind sixth-placed Bristol City in the Championship.

Millwall have dropped to 17th after a winless run of nine matches.

“The fact that we’ve not won enough games in a period means the gap starts to widen,” said Rowett.

“We are where we are because we have not won enough games, it’s simple as that.

“We’re caught in that mid-ground at the moment. We’ve not lost a lot of games, but we’ve not won lots – and unfortunately that means you end up in no man’s land. We’ve got to fight to turn some of those decent performances into winning ones. The only thing that does that is goals, the only thing that does that is taking opportunities.

“We’ve probably had opportunities in every single game where I can argue the opposition has been more clinical than us or shown more quality than us in those final third areas.

“It’s something we’ve got to get better at. We’ve also got to maintain scoring in different ways – last season we were very, very strong from set-pieces and this season we haven’t been as dangerous.

“We certainly can’t afford to drop off in different ways we score as a team because we’re not the type of team that is going to score easily all the time.

“We’ve got five games until the window opens. Of course we’ve got an eye on that and of course we want to strengthen in January, but at the same time we’ve got a lot of points to play for until then.

“We need to step up. I don’t think recent results have been anywhere near acceptable enough for our group.

“I don’t think performances have been bad, but I don’t think they have been good enough to win games. We know what we’ve got to do, we’ve got to stop talking about it and start doing it if we want to have that ambition we’ve shown over the last year.”

Millwall head to Middlesbrough tomorrow with Rowett revealing Scott Malone is playing with a niggle.

He said: “It’s a strange season, with so many games packed together. We’ve got about five or six players with issues who are just trying to get through.”