JOE Edwards said he does not want Millwall to “pat themselves on the back” for losing football matches after the Lions fell to a 3-1 defeat against Middlesbrough.
Not unlike the defeat to Leicester City in the FA Cup last week, Millwall played well for periods of the game against a side who many would have seen as pre-match favourites.
The Lions also arguably produced their strongest 30 minutes under Edwards as they dominated Middlesbrough from the start and attacked the heart of their defence repeatedly but only had one goal from Joe Bryan to show for their efforts. Jake Cooper hit the crossbar from close range in the biggest missed chance.
A lack of killer instinct and defensive lapses allowed the Teesside club back into the game and they won through goals from Lukas Engel, Isaiah Jones and Marcus Forss.
Speaking in his post-match press conference, Edwards said: “Very similar story (to last week’s loss against Leicester) in the way the game played out where we have loads to pleased with the quality of our performance, the control, how clear the idea of what our team is and what we’re trying to be now. Probably a bit more frustrating because it’s the second week running.
“And although I’ll always be one to search for positives and keep following our process – which will do, we’ll get back to work Monday and there won’t be a big grey cloud hanging over it – but we want to be a team with a bit about us and we don’t want to be a team that keeps patting ourselves on the back for losing football matches. So it’s disappointing.
“The goals against us are soft and the bottom line is when you’re playing against a team of that level, if you dominate as much as we did for the first half an hour – the big moments like Coops hitting the bar – if you dominate you have to cash in, you have to get that second goal and it could be a different day. But you can’t afford to make errors around your own goal because they’ll punish you. And they took the game away from us with being clinical being around our goal and we didn’t do that to them.”
On the lack of depth in the squad due to the constant injuries the Lions keep picking up, he said: “I felt that today, I felt it in other games. I remember being stood down there when we were hanging onto the 1-0 lead against Norwich and when I saw the subs Norwich started bringing on against us, I remember thinking it’s going to get harder the final 20, 30 minutes. It felt like it today [too].
“When we’re all fit, we’ve got a good squad and I had a period mid-December when I had to leave a player out of the squad because everyone’s fit and you’re kind of thinking ‘right, that’s unusual’. And then all of a sudden, lo and behold, there’s a group of about seven of them down there that aren’t able to play and it hurts us.
“Particularly when the strongest part of the season has been the festive period where we went four clean sheets and three wins (in a row) and you take out a lot of the core that were doing that, it’s going to hit any team.”
Defensive errors let Millwall down with the most glaring example being Joe Bryan’s misjudged header that allowed Jones to put Boro 2-1 at a crucial point of the game.
Edwards said: “They’re just mistakes, to be honest. They’re the kind of thing where if there’s a pattern over a period of games where there’s certain spaces in your team or certain areas where you get hurt, you can get on the training pitch, you can do meetings about it.
“I don’t need to show Joe [Bryan] his under-hit, cushion header. I don’t need to show Joe that back or talk to him about it, it’s an error. And then the third goal… by then we’ve changed shape because we’re going for it and I wanted another attacking player in Romain on the pitch because we were going for the equaliser but didn’t really look like we were creating much so we changed shape, which we haven’t done in a few weeks, and you get caught a bit open.
“I still think the way that third goal plays out – Brooke and Wes are there – I’m sure them two will be disappointed and they can deal with that. As we’ve had moments like that against Boro where we’ve been in two v two and we don’t punish them like they punish us.
“But the fact is it’s not a pattern at the moment. I don’t look at us and continuously feel we’re easy to score against, you kind of just have to say ‘mistakes happen and they’re costly’ as opposed to saying ‘what can we learn from it.’
“All we learn is that if you make mistakes and you don’t take your chances, football is brutal like that.”