Our Head Coach spoke to the press ahead of the Reds' midweek trip to Ewood Park.
ON BLACKBURN ROVERS
“You have to respect that they have good form and that they are dangerous on the counter-attack, so of course stopping counter-attacks is an important weapon for us going there.
“I know if we can stop them from what they have done well, that’s one part, and the second thing is to do the things so well offensively that we know we can do.
“We don’t only have to improve one part of our offense – we need to improve different ways; we need to be better at counter-attacks, we have to be better at solving the opponent’s pressing and create chances from that.
“We know we can create even more chances from set-pieces and score from that, so for me it shows that we have a lot of jobs to do, but it also shows the potential of us actually being able to create more chances and score more goals that we can improve more than one area.
“If you look at that, hopefully when we work with it even more – which we are doing now – we can make bigger improvements as well, because we’ll need it against a team like Blackburn, not to just take away their strengths, but to show our quality offensively.
“Then I think we will have chances to win this game.”
ON BLACKBURN ROVERS FORM
“When a team is in good form, you need to have a really good performance because they will have a lot of confidence.
“But I’m pretty sure that if we show a really good side, if we can take with us the defensive organisation and work rate from the last game and add even more offensive quality, we will surprise Blackburn. Then we will take away the momentum that they already have.
“When we take away the momentum in the game, then we have all the chances to win the game.
“Form, of course, helps you to have confidence, but it is something that is also lost pretty fast. You can win five games in a row, but the moment you lose, those five games are forgotten.”
ON ATTACKING OPTIONS
“We need to find more goals – we need to score more goals. That’s something that I think everyone is aware of; the players and everyone outside, all of us agree that we need to score more goals to stay in this league.
“I hope that the most efficient way for us is to improve our game, improve the players that are in the squad and that’s my biggest ambition right now.
“If we get more goals from a player coming in from the outside, then that’s another discussion and I will not go into that discussion until another player is here because I only want to discuss the players who are here.
“I’m comfortable that we can improve our offense with the players we have compared to what we have shown with the same players. How long it lasts in comparison to other teams is difficult for me to say because I cannot control what our competition is doing.
“What I do know is that we can improve our offense with the players that we have; that they can create more chances and score more goals.
“We need to do it and I’m comfortable knowing we will improve this.”
ON DEFENSIVE ORGANISATION
“We have a pretty stable foundation going into games knowing that it’s not so easy to create a lot of chances or score goals against us – this is an important foundation.
“Then we know what we have with this kind of organisation is that we’re a hard team to beat, but we need to be able to have an offensive approach to score enough goals to turn draws into wins.
“That’s the balance we are in. I don’t know if the right word is ‘to take more risks’ – it’s more about developing the ideas and implementing the ideas, so that we use them every day.
“Now, there can be games that we show for a couple of minutes pretty good combinations, but they are not shown game by game and, in games, they are not shown as frequent as we want to, which is normal because the time we have been here is not very long – it’s not even comparable to a normal pre-season.
“What we have to understand is that we have not arrived in the pre-season – we have arrived in the middle of the season with a challenging situation in the table. So, you cannot have the same patience you have in pre-season; we have to develop to improve these things even faster than what we have shown.
“But at least I am happy that we have developed a defence and I look forward to doing more in offense and showing more continuity in understanding our principals in offense.”
You can watch Poya’s press conference on iFollow Barnsley.
