Joey, how is the squad looking ahead of Saturday? Were any injuries picked up on Monday or Friday?
No, we’re out of it at this point. Josh Grant was back with the group today for the first time and everybody is delighted to see Josh because he gives us another bit of quality.
People are fit and knocked in now and everybody is looking forward to this busy period.
Will he have a chance of playing before the end of the season if things go well?
Yeah, if he keeps progressing, why not? The games come at us thick and fast and getting Josh back will be like a new signing.
From our perspective, it’s so pleasing to see him out there, but also he’s feeling really good, so long may that continue.
The past couple of games, you’ve been able to freshen things up in attack, but other than that, you have had that consistency. That is something you have struggled with this season due to injury.
You are always striving for familiarity of team selection and tactical selection because that means you are in a good groove and you don’t have to alter too much.
Enormous credit goes to the players. They are taking on the concepts and we have got a lot of young people developing in that group and a lot of people that are new to League One, even if they are relatively inexperienced at this level.
To get us to this point where we have got seven games to play and we’ve got safety, albeit it is not mathematically impossible, but it is looking like Monday’s result of the back of Friday’s result put us beyond that 50-point bracket and now it’s about how high we can finish and how many games we can win in the run-in.
That sets us up for where we want to be, which is challenging to get promoted in the coming years.
When you look at the development over the season in League One, particularly defensively, your full-backs are 20 and 22 and your centre-backs are young and are going to get better. That has got to be an exciting place to be to see if the development continues.
Yeah, and don’t forget Lamare Bogarde just in front is only 19 and Josh Coburn up front is just 20. We’ve got a lot of young players, but we do have some nice experience in there with Sam Finley, Scott Sinclair, etc.
We’ve got a nice balance in the group, but that backline has been growing and growing as the season has gone on.
The past few games, we went through the data with the boys of what we’ve been offering all season and how well the lads have done in recent weeks in limiting the opponents’ chances.
The next period we go in, that will be really examined, especially the game we go into on Saturday because David McGoldrick and James Collins are very effective at the level and we will have to be as good as we’ve been in recent weeks to nullify a very exciting attack from Derby.
When Lewis Gibson has played this season, you have won 50 per cent of the games you have played. That’s quite telling.
Yeah and Jordan Rossiter was a huge loss to us, but Lamare and Grant Ward have come in and picked up the workload.
Jarell has been superb in his short time here and, obviously, him getting sent off in the Pompey game was a huge blow to us, but then James Connolly steps in and looks like he has never missed a beat.
From our perspective, we’ve got to keep fostering that. There are going to be times when there are tricky moments because they are young and there is a lack of experience, but my belief is once young people get that sense of what good looks and feels like, they want more and more of it and the potential then is limitless in terms of where they can go in the game.
It is tricky to get them through that and the foundation that’s built on with young people sometimes is quite volatile, but once you make it through the tough times with them, the upside in my experience is well worth the scrap you have to go through to get there.
You’ve got that nice balance between the experienced players and some of the younger ones. Is that as you sit down for recruitment next season where you have to be wary to maintain that balance?
The beauty of it is the young players have a season of experience. Luca Hoole, you forget last year in League Two was his first senior football moment.
He hadn’t really been exposed to it and then he gets another baptism of fire in League One. James Connolly, the same. Lewis Gordon is having his first senior experience.
They will all benefit from that so this time next year, they are looking at 70-80 games of football at the level and that starts to settle you down.
We all think we’re great coaches and we all want to give people advice and grow players, but nothing grows a player like selecting him for a first-team match and you learn in the arena.
Hopefully, you can teach them stuff outside of that so that there are not too many harsh lessons in there, but on the whole, you develop your game by playing competitive football.
For our young backline, and I tap Lamare into that, these are very important moments in their career and the more we foster those relationships, the better it is for our team in the coming years.
In terms of experience, a match like this weekend will be perfect. You have got David McGoldrick, who did not always score lots of goals at the top level, but he was seen as the glue in that Sheffield United side that played so well.
He’s kind of a Championship-level Bobby Firmino. He does lots of really good stuff, linking the team together. He’s a very smart player.
Premier League in that Sheffield United team, he didn’t get the goals because it’s a very difficult division. At League One level, before his Sheffield United days, at Ipswich he was a nuisance and a constant thorn in Championship defences and his experience is what sets him apart.
He is in that Firmino role, that kind of Dennis Bergkamp type, coming and linking from the frontline and at League One level, he is an absolute nuisance and the key for Derby is keeping him fit and on the pitch because when he is on there, as we have seen this season, he is a goalscorer and a match-winner.
So he tries to take defenders into positions they don’t want to go to. How do you make sure that doesn’t happen on Saturday?
We’ll have a plan for him, but we’ve got to focus on what we do. We know from Barnsley and Ipswich’s visits to our stadium, we can make it really tricky for teams.
Charlton were free-scoring before they came to our stadium. They weren’t free-scoring and everyone said they had an off day, but the next time out three days later against Burton, they were back on it again.
We need to give our lads more credit for the job they did, and the same at Fleetwood. We have had one shot on target against us in 180 minutes. For our young group, certainly with (Jayden) Stockley and (Jack) Marriott at Fleetwood, and Charlton’s front three have been a menace in recent weeks for League One defences.
We are confident we can cause Derby lots of problems, but also it’s a big test for us. They need to win. They just dropped out of the play-off positions, there will be pressure on them and there is a little bit of pressure off us because of our recent results.
But we want to get back the three points we didn’t get at Pride Park and also we want to give a good account of ourselves in our stadium against a top-end League One team.
Joey, Grant Ward has shown himself to be a top operator in midfield for you. Are you hopeful that he will be a Rovers player next season?
We’ll start speaking to those boys now as we are approaching securing League One status so it is natural we will start having conversations with our lads, Wardy being one of them.
He has been superb since he came in, he has grown from game to game and now he has added spectacular goalscoring moments, which we were hoping was the next piece of the jigsaw. Long may that continue.
He is the right cultural fit for us, the way he works and approaches training and the gym. He’s settled into the group and he has been a huge plus in our season.
We will definitely be sitting down and trying to convince him that Bristol Rovers is his future.
Josh Grant’s situation is probably a bit more complicated because of the long injury coming into the expiry of his contract. Have there been negotiations with him or assurances that there is a future here for him?
We spoke about getting the operation. From the club’s perspective, it’s a significant chunk of change to help Josh get the operation. We said ‘Look, however long it takes, we’ll be with you on that’.
We haven’t quite finalised it or got a signature on the contract, but there are a few of our boys where I didn’t want anybody getting their focus mixed up with a contract negotiation and all of a sudden your focus is not on your day to day and where it should be.
The focus was to get to our threshold and we’re still not there yet. We want to get to that 52-point mark. At 51 points now, it’s sensible that we open negotiations with five or six of our players.
Some lads are in-contract who will want to extend, others are out of contract who we want to keep with us for the next stage of our build, which is, hopefully, barring a disaster, in League One next season.
We’ve got to learn to run, but only after we learn to walk and this year was a huge learning curve. We’ve got to keep adding to the group and pushing the standard if we want to be a promotion-thinking team in the near future.
One of the challenges you faced coming up this season was having a much-changed defence with Connor Taylor leaving, James Connolly getting injured straight away and a change at left-back. I imagine you want as much continuity as possible going into next season now the back four has started to bed in. Lewis Gibson has been a big part of that; do you hold any hope of signing him in the summer with his Everton contract coming to an end or do you believe he has proved he is Championship level when he is fully fit?
Obviously, that will depend on what Everton will do. I haven’t spoken to Dychey about it; we speak almost on a daily basis but Lewis is not one we have spoken about.
It will depend on what his contract is at Everton and what Everton want to do and what division Everton are in. If Everton drop into the Championship, they might want to keep hold of him. I don’t know. I don’t know what the future looks like. I think it’s less likely if they stay in the Premier League, but who knows?
I know Dychey, as a centre-half, will be watching Lewis and will be aware of his qualities.
We’d love him to stay at the football club, I think he knows exactly how we feel about him. From our perspective, if somebody comes from higher up with a bigger budget and the opportunity to play in the Championship, it’s going to be tricky.
But I think he’s just enjoying his football at the minute, he’s enjoying being fit, he’s enjoying being in a good defence that is getting results and limiting the opponent to few opportunities.
He’s played a lot of football for me as a manager and hopefully he wants to come and do that more. We would be delighted if that is the case, but the ball is not in our court.
You said on Monday that with the pressure off it would help some players reach another level. Have you noticed that in training? Have you noticed a fresh energy to go and attack these final games?
We’ve only been in today. The lads have been in good order; we gave them a couple of days off after the Friday and Monday games and the key now is filling their energy tanks.
At this point, the lads know what we’re looking to do and we’ve been successful in recent excursions with it.
We’re going to be tested by five of the top seven with some tough away games and teams in and around us in Port Vale and Shrewsbury in the midst of that and we will find out a lot about our group in terms of the work we’ve got to do in the off-season to hopefully come back and be a promotion-thinking team because none of us are here to stand still and just stay in League One.
That was the aim this season and I think it’s almost mission accomplished, but that isn’t the aim for next season and beyond.
What is the latest with Jordan Rossiter? Is he going to be back for the start of pre-season?
He’s definitely better and he has had a bit of good news this week; he’s got a lot more range of motion but I think it’s a month-by-month, week-by-week process with him and we’re hoping we can get him fully fit for the start of next season, but it’s softly, softly, catchy monkey with the couple of setbacks he had with his surgery and the injury.
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