On Saturday, the Pilgrims will travel to Ashton Gate to play Bristol City in the Championship, their shortest away trip of the year.
When Plymouth Argyle plays Bristol City at Ashton Gate on Saturday, Wayne Rooney has urged his team to be tough and difficult to beat.
Following their humiliating 6-1 loss to Norwich City at Carrow Road on Tuesday night, where they fell behind in the second minute and suffered their eighth away league loss of the season, the Pilgrims will resume Championship play. Rooney hopes his team will respond “positively” against Liam Manning’s Bristol City, who are in 12th place and have won two and lost three of their last five games.
“It’s important to stay in the game and make sure we don’t concede early on,” Rooney added. “Obviously, players’ confidence is impacted by the previous outcome, but we must confront that and remain strong. We must be challenging to play against.
“It was my final message to the players at Norwich before we went out: ‘Don’t concede early because if we concede early we know it will be a long night against a good team’. We need to make it more difficult for teams to score.”
In seven of their past eight games, Argyle has given up the first goal, and in their last three games, they have done it within the first eight minutes, both at home against Watford and away to Derby County and Norwich.
For players, staff, and supporters, a performance like the one we witnessed in the Norwich game is difficult, Rooney stated. The response to that outcome is now the most crucial factor.
“Of course, several of our key players have been injured, but I often talk to players who feel they should be playing because it’s crucial that they seize their chance when they join the club. None of the eleven players who began the previous game, in my opinion, did themselves any favours by doing that. On Saturday, we have a chance to try to make that right.
He went on to say: “There must be a moment of quiet after giving up a goal, after which we should return to our previous task and attempt to exit it in that manner. I believe that when we do admit, especially when we’re not at home, we don’t respond the same way I want.
Rooney said, “We went to Leeds and did that, and we lost the game,” in response to a question on if he was inclined to play extremely defensively and “park the bus” against Bristol City.
“It comes down to personnel, an internal struggle as individuals as well as from players together as a team. We are trying to do different things. You must have that pride, in my opinion. You can lose football games, of course—I’ve said it before—but nobody likes to watch you lose a game like we did against Norwich.
There will be a packed house of more than 3,000 travelling Green Army supporters at Bristol City, despite Argyle’s terrible away record this season, which has seen them accumulate just two points from nine games.
“I think the supporters have been terrific, and I understand their irritation after the previous game,” Rooney said. “But, if you like, we are heading into a south-west derby, and there is no better game to show how you felt about the last game. I’m confident that the players will have the support of the fans, so it’s up to us to perform well.
“Myself and for the players, we have a lot of responsibility to try to move this club forward. What we saw on Tuesday night was not good enough and was not acceptable – the players know that. The main thing now is we show a real positive reaction.”
Argyle’s hammering by Norwich came after crushing defeats away to Sheffield Wednesday (4-0) and Cardiff City (5-0) earlier in the campaign, but it followed a three-game unbeaten run in which the Pilgrims had picked up five points. Rooney said: “Of course, it was a bad result but this season there is many positives as well. I think we need to bring some realism to the situation.
“There is lots of positives throughout the season but there has been two or three big results against us, which we need to cut out because that certainly doesn’t help anything.”
On whether he felt under pressure as Argyle head coach, Rooney said: “There’s always pressure on any manager. When you lose games in a bad way, of course there is a lot of pressure on the manager, on the players, on everyone – and no-one wants to see that. It’s my job to try to make sure we get that right.”
Argyle are 20th in the Championship table, with 17 points from the same number of matches, after the thrashing by Norwich. Rooney continued: “I think we need to be realistic in terms of where we are at. We know what our goal is for the season.
“We have got a plan and we are on plan at the minute. We are where we should be, obviously, the table doesn’t lie from that point of view, but I think whether you have got a small budget or not, you have to have that desire, that fight, to not concede goals as easy as we do. That’s a responsibility on myself to make sure I bring that out of the players and on Tuesday that didn’t happen.”
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