Joey, your selection at the weekend was compromised by illness. Is that gone or are you still having problems?
We lost Lofty this morning. It started with Anssi (Jaakkola) and it’s gone through about 50-60 per cent of the group and some have not been able to come in for a few days.
Zain Westbrooke is saying he’s struggling to walk up the stairs and clearly there is something in the general population everywhere and there are a lot of people going down with it.
It tends to be bad for 24-48 and then rumbles on for five or six days. We lost John Marquis and Zain Westbrooke on Sunday morning and we lost Jordan Rossiter on Thursday. We thought we lost Sam Finley, but luckily he felt fine and got on the bench.
There are about five or six others with sniffles and coughs and it hasn’t quite got them as bad, but we’re hopefully coming out of it. The only ones who couldn’t train today was Ryan Loft, who went down last night, and Jordan who is just coming out the other side. He should be in contention for Friday, but he hasn’t trained with the group yet.
I haven’t seen him (Loft), but John Marquis was ruled out of Sunday’s game and still couldn’t train today. If it lasts that long for Lofty, it’s going to make him a doubt for the game on Friday.
Your record going into the weekend was really good, so that defeat to Boreham Wood is one bad performance. You can’t ignore it, but how do you approach that with the group?
The build-up for the cups was slightly different and team selection wouldn’t have been the way on Sunday other than the bout of illness which took a few options off the table. We adjusted slightly and obviously we didn’t play anywhere near the level of performance.
The fans and the owner and the CEO won’t want to hear this, but for me the FA Cup is just an extension of ego. I get to go to a nice stadium and play a Premier League side, it might be on the telly and the fans get a nice day out, but the reality of it is you are not going to win the competition when you are a League One side trying to establish yourself.
You might have a good cup run, but for us, if we were going to have a flat performance and be struck down by illness and there was a weekend for it, I would prefer it to be in the cup as opposed to the league. You never want a flat performance anywhere, but we have to draw a line under it, move past it.
We’ve gone over it this morning and had some conversations about our operating standards going forward. Some things we are prepared to negotiate on, some things we are not.
The lads will be back better for it on Friday. We play another tough team in the division away from home in a good stadium and it is a chance to put right that result. We’ll have a slightly different team as well, which should help.
You said before the Peterborough game that the games against them and Bolton were going to be a really good test and an indication of where you are. Having got halfway through that with three points, does that give you hope it is more than just surviving that this level that you are talking about? Do you think this is a group that can push on and is starting to believe in itself?
Yeah. Like anything, you always need a couple of bodies. I think we’re still a couple of bodies away from having a group capable of challenging to get out of the division, but we’re making a decent fist of what would be a season of consolidation.
The reality of this season is if we can establish our status as early as possible, we’ll see where we are, but for me getting to 52 points and ensuring we’re a League One side next season allows us another two recruitment windows in January and the summer.
If it happens quicker than that, great, but Sunday was a rude awakening for people maybe getting ahead of themselves because I think the depth in the squad, judging by the fact we got dumped out of the squad by Boreham Wood, at the level required at this moment.
Speaking of adding to the squad, are you expecting a quiet January or are you hoping to do a little bit?
I don’t know, I don’t know what’s available. It’s a strange window, January. For me, it will be a couple of people going out and a couple of people coming in. That’s always ideal, slight tweaking, it’s just natural for every January.
Wael has been superb in his support and just chatting around some of the targets that could be available in January, he’s keen on producing a really good team for the football club and his support has been incredible since we’ve been here.
We’re always looking to evolve and move the group forward. If January presents an opportunity to do that, I think we’ll do that.
I expect it won’t be masses of changes because we only need a bit of adjustment, but there will be lads here who haven’t played enough and will naturally want to go out and play from the start.
Friday night at Bolton, then. Ian Evatt is the manager and he was a very good defender in his day. They seem to be built on keeping things tight and not giving away too many goals.
Yeah. I don’t tend to focus on opposition teams. If we reach our level of performance, we’re more than a match for anybody in this division, which I think we’ve shown in the opening two or three months of the season.
If we don’t reach the level of performance, which has been shown against Crawley and Boreham Wood and a couple of other games, we’ll get our backsides handed to us. The focus this week is about us, what we’re going to do, how we’re going to do things better.
Bolton are probably 12 months down the evolution of us. They are a team that was in League One and was relegated and then built their way back up. They were similar to us in League Two that they started slow and finished quickly.
They then used that momentum to consolidate and I think they started really quickly but then had a sluggish spell and picked up again and consolidated. They have now moved on again and this is what being a League One club allows you to do.
Bolton, being a Premier League club in the past with the stadium, it allows you to attract players in League Two and League One and because of the Sam Allardyce and Premier League days, it still has a bit of an allure. It’s close to Manchester so they recruit from that North West hotbed and they have progressed their club quite quickly.
I see us on a similar transition to them, albeit a season behind them because they went up into League One before us. They are a side like Plymouth who were probably two years ahead of that cycle when Ryan Lowe did it. You’ve got to take a look around and take steps in the right direction.
I’m absolutely convinced I will get Bristol Rovers into the Championship before the end of my tenure here, but let’s not try to run before we can walk. This is softly, softly catchy monkey, you’ve got to build solid foundations and Sunday pointed out if we have one or two of our key components of our team out, the people coming in to do the job behind them at this moment in time aren’t capable of doing it at the level of Boreham Wood, never mind Bolton Wanderers.
We need to get them up to speed and if we can’t get them up to speed, they’ll leave and we’ll bring in new people who can do the job.
You mentioned their much more illustrious history in the past 15-20 years, they have been a big team and you must have played there?
I made my debut there, chasing Jay Jay Okocha. We lost 2-0 and I actually played alright and stayed in the team and the rest his history.
I will always remember it. I didn’t know I was playing in the dressing room and Kevin Keegan reads the teamsheet out. I wasn’t in the team on the Friday for the team shape.
I was like ‘Did he just name me in the team?’ Robbie Fowler was like ‘Yeah, you’re starting’. I was like ‘s***!’
I didn’t know and the nerves come over you. I went out for the warm-up shaking like a s****** dog, came back in and I sat in the dressing room and a calmness descended over me. By the time I got in the tunnel and I was calm, I was like ‘Alright, I’m built for this’ and I knew at that point I could live in that environment.
Some people never shake off the nerves and it eats them up. If you’ve got all the talent in the world or a lack of it, when you’re thrown in at the deep end that’s when you find out.
It’s that moment when you walk into the coliseum. Does it slow down or get quicker? If it gets quicker, strap yourself in, you’re going to have a difficult career. If it slows down, open a bank account and get ready to earn a right few quid.
Joey, Scottish football is bringing in a ban on heading for professional players the day before and after games to reduce the risk of brain injuries. Would you support that in England?
An old mate of mine said to me, ‘It is better to be a lion for a day than a rat for a lifetime’. If you want to play elite-level sport, football or rugby, there is contact involved, you could get hurt and that could have ramifications on you in the future.
Unfortunately, when you do stuff at high intensity when you’re younger, it pays you back tenfold in the body when you get older.
If people want to play football, you run the risk of heading the ball and getting dementia, but you can play football and get cancer like Nick Anderton through absolutely no fault of your own. Nobody knows what life’s journey has got for us.
I think if they abolish heading from football, I think they will ruin the game beyond repair. I don’t think it would be worthwhile to do that, but if they show correlation between heading the ball and early death or early-onset dementia or Parkinson’s or something, then we would be stupid to not take that on board.
I’m not a scientist, I’m a footballer and I’d be gutted if we couldn’t head the ball in football.
If you said to me, ‘You’re going to have dementia when you’re 62, but you’ve had a great career’, I think most lads would swap you for that. I genuinely do. Some might say no, but that could happen to you without heading the ball as a footballer.
I’m a massive fan of rugby league and there are huge problems with the legacy of playing that game and rugby union is the same.
We’ve got to be careful not to sanitise the world. The world is a rough and ready place and you do high-stakes stuff, you pick up injuries.
If you want to live in a cotton wool ball and not come out of the house, that’s you’re prerogative, but I don’t, I want to head the ball, I want to play footy. Am I a fool for doing that? We’ll find out later in life, but I only get one and I intend to enjoy it and I enjoy the competition of football.
I’ve seen Chris Sutton banging the drum on it and Jeff Astle’s family. It’s so hard, because if you went back and asked those lads ‘Do you not want to play footy and not head the ball?, I guarantee you they’d all say no, they all loved football.
I know the ball had laces and it was a lot heavier, like a medicine ball back in the day compared to the flyaways we use now. They are mega light now compared to what they once were.
If we know this is happening, it’s like CTE stuff in the NFL, they show the lads it and they still want to crack on and play because they love playing the sport. I think it is sensible to show them the information but I think we have to be careful putting draconian rules in to protect people for their safety.
I don’t understand in 2022 that the Government tell you what you can and can’t put in your body as an adult. I get it before you’re 18, but they’re telling you that you can drink alcohol but you can’t do certain other things.
I don’t think governments across the world should have jurisdiction over you and your body, once you’re north of 18.
Paul Coutts and Harry Anderson, how far away are they?
They are both back on the grass but it is probably too tight for the weekend for the pair of them.
Scott Sinclair, is there any news on his contract situation?
No, not as yet. We’ve started discussions with him and his agent, so no doubt that will unfold in the next couple of weeks.
You were mentioning that some players may want to go elsewhere in January. Have you had any players come to you to ask if anything is opening up for them to move on?
No, not as yet, but you usually tend to feel that. Naturally, it’s the lads who haven’t been playing from the start and haven’t been getting on.
It won’t be the ones we really want to keep - Aaron (Collins) isn’t coming and saying ‘I want to get out in January’. It will be lads who are frustrated at the minutes they are getting but as of yet, we haven’t had anybody, albeit we’ve come off the back of two cup games and there have been changes to the team.
I imagine the next block of games up until the window opening in January, it will start to firm up and people will explore pastures new.
SIGN UP: To receive our free Rovers newsletter, bringing you the latest from the Mem
