GARY Rowett believes the injuries that have hit the Lions this season have prevented a top-six challenge – but he praised the “remarkable” effort of a number of his squad.
Rowett hasn’t had a full squad to choose from at any point this season as nine players have missed at least a month of the campaign through injury.
Only five players have yet to miss a minute of Championship football this season – 3,420 minutes excluding added-time – and Millwall have two of them, Bart Bialkowski and Shaun Hutchinson. There are only two outfield players on that list, Hutchinson and Norwich’s Max Aarons.
Despite this campaign being over a month shorter than usual after the delayed end to 2019-20, Jed Wallace has started 36 league games out of 38, and Ryan Woods and Jake Cooper, 34 – the latter despite twice dislocating his shoulder.
Rowett said “there’s not a lot you can do” about the injuries in this campaign. Five of the injuries that kept players out for over a month have been sustained in impacts: Cooper, Murray Wallace, Matt Smith (both suffered a broken foot) and Ryan Leonard and Troy Parrott (both ankle ligaments). The others were muscled-related injuries.
Millwall have one of the smallest squads of senior players in the Championship, yet are on course for consecutive top-10 finishes for the first time since 2005.
Rowett demanded a play-off challenge before the start of the campaign, but injuries to forward players in particular scuppered that.
Parrott and Kenneth Zohore were ambitious loan signings to try to solve the goal-scoring problems up front, but both strikers missed large chunks of the campaign.
“There’s not a lot you can do,” Rowett said. “We always felt as though we’d need more players this season because of the amount of games and the amount of injuries we thought we’d get.
“I said early on in the season that to define your success this year will depend on how healthy you can keep your squad and how many injuries you get to key players.
“My opinion is that’s really stopped us from pushing as hard as we’d like to for those top-six positions.
“But I think a lot of clubs have gone through it, not necessarily similar, but they’ve had more injuries than normal.
“Everybody knew this was going to be one of the gambles playing Saturday-Tuesday-Saturday and not really having any breather or any chance for the players to recover naturally.
“The ones that have stayed fit have done remarkable to get this far. We just have to crack on but it has hampered a lot of things we’d like to have to done.”
Image: Millwall FC