Strugglers Struggle with Struggling Lions

MILLWALL
V
DONCASTER ROVERS

First of all, my apologies to regular readers for not being around for the last two matches.  Unfortunately I've been prevented from blogging by first my house deciding to fuse the day before the Barnsley match and then by my employers rather premature celebration of the festive season.  Anyway, normal service has been resumed!

Well the title says it all as Rovers again face side that aren't doing so well and as such, have a game where it is important to get something.  Millwall sit in the precarious 21st place that Donny would give their eye-teeth for at the moment.  Being 6 points adrift of safety, Rovers fans would happily take precarious over desperate!

MILLWALL 


I was just pleased withour performance because after quite a number of changes, it was a youngish side and this added some freshness and energy.  We have to replicate that at home to Doncaster and away to Leeds next Saturday, which would make it a good week. Kenny Jackett.

Millwall 21st?  Well they aren't kidding me!  A Lion's Den isn't usually a place to go if you're looking to come away with something.  When you look a little behind the table position, you see that they are where they are due to a disasterous September (yes, worse than Donny's).  Current overall form puts them 7th in the league.  When they win, they do so impressively, when they lose, they do so narrowly.  Couple that with 7 draws so far this season and you're left wondering whether we have  team that on occasions is not getting the rub of the green.

In the international break, England gave a text-book demonstrattion of how to defend by pressing the ball-carrier.  The basics are first to choose when to press him and second, when the other players see him being pressed, they tighten their marking of their man.  The result is that if the ball-carrier does manage to fend off his close attention, he has a difficult ball to play to retain possession.

If you look at Millwall's performance against Crystal Palace, they were certainly pressing the ball-carrier at times, but the marking job away from that was lacking.  But it's halfway there, its just that the other half is the difficult bit.

Up front and the crosses tended to be just a little too hard and high and the shooting was wild, as it was from Palace.

That thing I said about tight man-marking when pressing the ball carrier?  If you wtach the highlights against Bristol City its there all the time and the Robins could have had a cricket score had they taken the chances it caused.  Its almost like there is over-confidence in the man going to the ball.

The highlights v Blackpool were very short but once again you saw that Millwall's opponents were getting lots of chances.  Maybe there could be something in this match for Donny, especially when you consider that Donny have bettered Millwall's results against 2 out of 3 cases against the opponents I saw.  That's not going to happen many times this season.

DONCASTER ROVERS

So what's been happening while I've been gone? Well, in a nutshell, we embarrassed ourselves against arguably our most bitter local rivals; then we signed a lot of players on loan and then we put in a decent performance and got a rare clean-sheet against Watford on Saturday.

El-Hadji Diouf - "Best in the League"

The Willie McKay scheme is now getting into full flow with 5 of our 11 starters on Saturday being so-called shop-window players.  So far, we've seen El-Hadji Diouf, heralded by Dean Saunders as "the best player in the league" standing out as the best of our signings.  Good to see Dioufy grabbing the headlines for the right reasons, sad to see him picking up a hamstring injury that will surely see him not featuring tomorrow evening.

The rest?  Well we will see.  I think its fair to say Habib Beye (Oh Habib Beye) had a good debut on Saturday the Marc-Antoine Fortune also had his moments.  Obviously, the experiment really starts from here on.  I have no doubt more will join the ranks in the January transfer window making for even less familiar line-ups.

Listening to Dean Saunders' pre-match interview, it seems that he has similar look as his predecessor in terms of injuries.  Rovers have 14 players out at the moment, which Deano finds unbelievable, stating he has never seen anything like it in his career.  Welcome to Donny, Dean!  Imagine your difficulties without a Willie McKay able to find players to plug gaps.