MILLWALL head coach Joe Edwards believes the Lions’ heavy defeat at the hands of Ipswich Town had “nothing to do with the playing style”.
The Lions were battered 4-0 by the Tractor Boys on Wednesday night and were left hanging just above the relegation zone as a result.
The arrival of Joe Edwards last November brought with it expectations and suggestions of a style change for Millwall, a club that had spent the last eight years under Neil Harris and Gary Rowett playing a more counter-attacking and less expressive brand of football.
The damaging nature of the Ipswich defeat has reignited debate among fans on if a style change is possible with the Lions’ current set of players and if Edwards had implemented the process of change correctly.
The issue is particularly of interest given the Lions’ reputation across English football as hard-to-beat traditionalists, a reputation that would have taken a hit among neutral fans watching the humbling defeat live on TV.
However, the Millwall boss insisted that the primary issue during the Valentine’s Day bludgeoning was not style but the failure to defend properly.
Pressed by Sky Sports after the game if he had the players to implement changes to the style, a bullish Edwards said: “It’s nothing to do with type of football, it’s about defending. Obviously since I’ve come in people are looking for the narrative of ‘what’s the change? Is it about playing style? Possession? This, that?’
“I get that people look for narrative but at the end of the day, defending is the fundamentals of the game. And when I’m preparing a team to play against Ipswich knowing full well what Ipswich are about and how good they’ve been this season, there’s nothing from my end where we’ll going out with a licence to be loose in and around our own half or our box.
“Even the first 25 minutes of the game, we say we started well and it wasn’t from playing this absolute, total football. We were putting a lot of balls in their box, we had a lot of set-pieces because that’s always been a threat of ours. Everyone knows what people would want games to feel like at The Den where it’s not nice for the opponent. I felt like that is what we were doing.
“It had nothing to do with this over-elaborate style of play. The reality is it’s poor defending starting from when we give the ball away down the side of the pitch that leads to the corner. The defending is what has cost us, it’s nothing to do with playing style and personnel that match it.”