Alex Neil addresses Millwall injury 'excuse' after play-off hopes dashed

Millwall boss Alex Neil has been speaking after his side’s playoff hopes were effectively ended with a bruising defeat to Blackburn Rovers on Good Friday. The Lions lost 4-1 at Ewood Park, dropping to six points off the top six, and with two teams between them and sixth place Coventry City.

Neil’s men are not totally out of it, potentially in with a chance if they win all three games, but it seems very unlikely, especially with the goal difference they would require even if Coventry one won one of their last three games, while Bristol City only need one more win to put themselves out of the Lions’ reach.

Speaking after the Rovers defeat, Neil bemoaned Millwall’s injury troubles, telling Southwark News: “I think the frustrating thing from our point of view, obviously there’s a little bit of mitigating circumstances. We’ve got a young nineteen-year-old making his debut in goal.

“We lose Joe (Bryan) yesterday, he doesn’t make the game. We have to then put a right-back from right-back to left-back. Tristan [Crama] is playing what his third or fourth game at centre-back for us. We’ve got a back line really that’s been cobbled together.

“But I don’t want to, and I haven’t certainly from the player’s perspective, give us any excuses as to why we should lose the game. I think we’re all fully aware that when you change what three, potentially even four positions out of your back five, particularly at this stage of the season with the magnitude of the game that we needed to win, it’s certainly not helpful.”

Neil also spoke about the tactical dilemma he has faced between crowding the midfield or taking risks in the middle by playing two up top. He explained: “The difficulty I’ve got at the moment is trying to strike a balance between when you play two up front, you carry an extra threat, you carry an extra body in the box, but sometimes you’ll lose the middle of the pitch,” Neil said. “We didn’t have as much control of the game as what we would normally like today. That was a bit of an issue for us, but we carried a threat going the other way.

“It’s trying to strike that balance between how much control do you want to have have in relation to how much threat we have. For us we haven’t been able to have both control and have a threat. We’ve either controlled the game but not looked as if we can score as many goals as we wanted to score, or we’ve looked a real threat but have probably less control.

“I thought the game took exactly that shape and I was really reluctant until obviously the third goal goes in to stop that, because I still felt we carried a threat. We had probably three or four really good opportunities today to score. In recent weeks we’ve scored them and that’s been the biggest difference in the game When they went in, it gives us something to hang on and we’re excellent at sort of dropping and being compact and and hitting on the counter. We never really had an opportunity to get into that sort of state because we were always chasing the match at that point. That can be dangerous against good teams.”

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