Blackburn lost further ground on the top two after being denied by a last minute Rotherham equaliser – in a 1-1 draw – at the New York Stadium on New Years Day.
Bradley Dack, who couldn’t quite get a goal his performance probably warranted in Blackburn’s final game of the last year, got a present, his recent birthday would have wanted, when the former Gillingham midfielder opened the scoring midway through the second half.
That goal looked to be enough until David Ball, himself on an impressive goalscoring run, scored from close range in the 89th minute to deny Rovers all three points.
14 League One games unbeaten – 18 in all competitions – is very much promotion winning form. However, successive draws – following the lost points against Scunthorpe at the weekend – against sides where more probably would have been expected, means Wigan and Shrewsbury were able to extend their advantages over Blackburn in the automatic promotion places.
There wasn’t much doubt in Tony Mowbray’s mind Rovers deserved to win but it is what it is.
He told the Official Website post-match: ‘I think we deserved to win the match. We were frustrated to come in at half time with the scores level. We had the ball kicked off the line three times in the space of five seconds, but credit to Rotherham. We’re just frustrated with the manner of the goal we conceded today. I think it was the only way they were going to score, and we invited the pressure in the last few minutes. But never mind, it’s a learning curve for us – we have to learn and take it into the next game.’
Mowbray was sure, having got the first, we would ‘get a second’ but having failed to do so the fact we ‘invited the pressure late on’ cost us.
However, he isn’t letting it get him down too much as he knows, such is the nature of football, Blackburn will win games when we’ve not played that well so we just keep going, dust ourselves down and go again.
The boss concluded: ‘We’ll win games when we’re not playing particularly well, so we just have to keep going. Let’s keep up our resilience, because all teams in this league are finding it hard to beat us. When it clicks, it’s really good. I thought we were desperately unlucky not to win against Scunthorpe; today we saw off their physical threat and scored a great goal, but it wasn’t to be. There’s a fantastic spirit here and I’m sure that will see us through in the end.’
