Blackburn moved into the top six with a victory over Gillingham on Saturday. However, Tony Mowbray isn’t getting carried away as this position is the minimum the boss expected back in August.
Dominic Samuel’s latest goal for Blackburn – his fifth since arriving from Reading in the summer – opened the scoring and this proved enough to secure a 1-0 win at Ewood Park against a struggling Gillingham side, who remain in the bottom four.
A Derrick Williams effort came back off the post as Rovers were denied a second – a fine save from David Raya from Elliott List also made sure there wasn’t a surprise from the Gills.
Victory took us into the top six for the first time this season, which Mowbray knows is the minimum the boss hoped for at this stage, in fact knows anyone would have expected. Not that he’s getting carried away.
He told the Official Website: ‘I think it is the least of what we would have hoped or expected. Nobody should be shouting from the rooftops, we need to be at the top end of the table.’
It was far from the way Mowbray would want to win games – grinding them out – but sometimes needs much and all that.
Gillingham was one of those occasions but he hopes we’ll also get some where all the chances go in for Blackburn to secure convincing victories.
‘I know we are a game behind, and we had a pretty poor start losing our first couple of games, so take those games out of it and I know we’d be there or there abouts over the last six or seven games as we’ve won quite a few. So we have to just keep going, keep trying to grind them out, hopefully win games where all the chances go in and we feel as if we can really beat teams heavily,’ said Mowbray.
Concluding: ‘But there are going to be games where we have to grind them out and we managed to do that against Gillingham.’
