GARY Rowett had assessed Millwall’s start to the season ahead of the club’s fourth competitive match of the campaign.
The Lions recorded an opening-day win against Stoke City before being eliminated by Cambridge United in the Carabao Cup. Most recently, Rowett’s men suffered a 2-0 defeat away at Sheffield United where he was without four senior players through injury, illness or suspension.
The Millwall boss praised his side’s performance against the Potters, but admitted that they need to improve upon their poor performance at Bramall Lane ahead of hosting Coventry City this weekend.
“It’s quite hard to assess because we haven’t had a lot of games,” Rowett told NewsAtDen.
“With the cup game, you have to take it in isolation. So for me, if you look at our league form, we’ve won one and we’ve lost one.
“I wouldn’t say they were polar opposite games, but they were very different in terms of the first one where we were very good and very diligent in the way that we worked as a team, I thought our energy was excellent and there was some good quality at times. We scored two goals to win the game comfortably.
“Then to go away to Bramall Lane, which we know is a tough place to go. I know we’ve got a good record there, but ordinarily I don’t think that there’ll be many teams that take too much from those games. The disappointing thing was that we didn’t play with the same level of concentration and maturity as a team to be solid and not make those mistakes.
“When you make a couple of mistakes like that early in the game, realistically, just like any team coming to our place, you’re not going to get anything out of the game.
“I was disappointed after the game with that, but we know what we’ve got to do. The easiest thing in the world to do is to say that our away form wasn’t great last year and it’s carried on this year – well we’ve played one game, and it was against a very good side.
“Until we’ve had five games at home and fives games away, it’s very difficult to assess the team in its entirety. I think you see little bits that you like and little bits that we perhaps know that we’ve got to make sure don’t creep into our game like the defensive mistakes that we saw at the weekend.
“The second 45 minutes were much, much better. We didn’t finish off those moves as well but we certainly had a lot more control.”
Photo: Millwall FC