Town manager Paul Jewell will be looking for his side to take the five-goal second half display at Barnsley last week into today’s home game against his old club Derby. The Blues boss says his team desperately need to improve their concentration and stop shipping goals in the alarming manner they have throughout his time in charge.
Jewell said: "We’ve got to try and take the second half performance into the game on Saturday and [the games] following that. Certainly the second half performance should give us heart, but it’s a consistency thing.
"When we’re good, we can be very good but when we’re not at our best we’re OK. When we’re not at our best we concede goals and we get beaten too easily.
"We’ve got to be stronger. I’ve said before that mentally and physically we’ve got to be stronger at certain times in games. If we can do that, we can see out periods of pressure, we’ll always get the opportunity to score goals.
"The supporters were obviously delighted with the second half and the five goals, and the players were as well. We want to use that positive energy to go into the game on Saturday.”
He says that in the first half at Oakwell it was the same story with individual errors leading to goals: "I don’t think teams are cutting us open. Last week, the first goal was a penalty, which should have been dealt with, the second goal was poor marking and the third was a freekick.
"That wasn’t a one off, we’ve been tentative at set plays and I think that’s a confidence thing.
"When you know you’re strong and you’re doing well and you get a corner against you, you’re confident you’re going to defend it. At the minute, we’re not.”
Jewell says this wasn’t a problem earlier in the season: "We hadn’t conceded a goal from a set play until we played Crystal Palace. The worst thing I’ve ever said to the players on a Friday was that our set play concentration was good before that game.
"They scored from the second phase of a freekick and ever since then we’ve conceded goals willy-nilly.
"It’s not as if we don’t work on them on the training ground, we do. Individual errors have cost us goals, which have then changed the course of games.”
The tendency to let in a second goal soon after a first is also a concern: "What’s cost us has been that we’ve conceded goals very quickly, one after another.
"We can’t be happy with our defensive record, but we defend as a team, starting at the front.
"We’ve given some bad goals away, there’s no doubt about that. We’ve made individual errors that have been very costly to us and when things aren’t going your way, individual errors always cost you. When things are going your way, you tend to get away with them.
"It’s been down to the whole group, not just the back four, it’s the whole team and at times we’ve been a bit loose.”
Ultimately, the Liverpudlian says belief is the big issue: "It’s just confidence really. I keep talking about confidence, it’s a huge factor in life, let alone football.
"I’m hoping [last week’s win] is a turning point. We’ve had a few turning points already this year but we just haven’t had that consistency. We had a nice run in September and October and then we went on a terrible run.
"We don’t seem to draw any games, we either win or lose everything. We’ve got it in our locker to score goals, but obviously we’ve conceded far too many as well.”
Story syndicated from TWTD.co.uk