Manager Brian Barry-Murphy reflects on Dale’s victory over Bristol Rovers at the Memorial Stadium…
“The lads are ecstatic and rightly so,” said BBM.
“It starts to feel like a little bit of reward for our performances over the last few weeks, where we feel as if haven’t had the points total, bearing in mind how we well we’ve played.”
What pleased the Boss the most about Saturday’s performance?
“The character and the overall mentality of the whole group. The staff have been working incredibly hard with the players and we’ve had some tough blows in terms of conceding in the last minute against Gillingham and in the last minute against Oxford. Those were real tough blows in a footballing context, so that [the character and mentality] pleased me, and to be able to give the players what I felt they deserved.
“We’ve had a few different things - members of our squad have got family members who are struggling and David is really sick at the moment. And David Clough - his name has been in amongst our Club a lot this week with his contribution to the Club, so there has been quite a lot of big things happening in that respect. Those are quite emotional things, so to cap the week off with a victory for everybody associated with our Club is just what we wanted.”
He continued: “It takes a lot of courage to play the way we play all the time, especially when the results haven’t gone the way we felt we deserved. Like I said, Tuesday night was a real difficult blow when it comes late in the game and the analysts will show you that it [Oxford’s winner] was offside and shouldn’t have counted, but even today the margins are quite fine.
“We created loads of chances today and were really dangerous going forward, but at the end when Bristol are chasing the game there are chances for them but we defended for our lives and the officials made the right call at the right time which we didn’t get on Tuesday night, but we try not to focus on that and it suits us to do that.”
And BBM says the win is just rewards for the way the players have been playing.
“The lads always believe in the way we work and the way we want to do things, so somewhere along the line you want to see the results to back that up and say to the lads ‘yeah, this is what happens when you stick to what we do’.
“The work ethic - we had a lot of players there who were out on their feet an carrying injury towards the end of the game but nobody wanted to come off. We have a bench with five subs again plus a goalkeeper, so hopefully we can help the lads by adding to the squad over the next few days and try to be as busy as we can before Monday.”
Watch BBM’s post-match interview in full on iFollow.