Joey, we haven’t spoken to you since Jarell signed. You went up and watched Liverpool’s under-21s. Was it specifically to have a look at him?
Yeah. Liverpool always have good talent coming through their age groups and sometimes when you’re in a spot where you know players are going to be available, you can watch clips of them and you can talk about them and speak to coaches, but nothing beats watching them live and getting your eyes on them.
For us, to see him play in that arena and see how he moved and all those types of things were very important because we don’t have an abundance of loans and you’ve got to make sure the ones that you take are right for playing in your style. For us, we think Jarell absolutely is.
You obviously liked what you saw. What is it you’re hoping that he’ll bring to the team?
He’s just a really good passer of the football. Obviously, he’s been brought in to be a defender, but we want to control the ball and we want to play and it’s important that our defenders are capable of breaking lines and handling the ball.
On the flipside of that, he’s got really good qualities and when you’ve been training with Liverpool’s first team, being in and around that picture, the next step in your progression is to get out and have regular men’s football.
Thankfully, Liverpool have trusted us with this stage of his development and we’re absolutely delighted to have him.
There will be some moments because he’s a young player, but also for us, we can’t go and buy tried and tested at this level. They are very expensive and the option then is to go really old with the veteran option, which is out there, but that has problems in terms of where you can keep your line and stuff like that.
And there is the old adage of you can’t teach and old dog new tricks, so we’re going to go young in this window and I’m excited by it. It will force me to be a better coach and it will force us to learn new things.
But also the upside of it is when young players grasp a concept and bring it to their game, the confidence levels that it can bring out of them, as we saw with the lads last season, when they get it, there is nothing better because they are fearless with it.
After the postponement last week, you’ve had a week with him and Ellery as well. That has got to help them bed in?
Yeah, absolutely. They were ready to go last week in terms of they came in bright behind the eyes and ready to play.
Obviously, the game went as well as many others with the weather and it would have been a baptism of fire if you go in against Sam Vokes and Brandon Hanlan and Wycombe, but at some point you’re going to get that exposure.
Saturday, Morecambe have Cole Stockton, Jensen Weir, Michael Mellon and you’re going to get tested again.
Who knows where the weather is at and where the wind is at? I know from my time in the North West, especially on that west coast from my Fleetwood days, it can get quite exciting with the wind.
The fact is the lads are going to have to overcome it in the next period.
So, five days left of the window. Is anything moving closer?
Yeah, we’ll possibly do one or two more out. There is definitely something bubbling out and maybe another one.
I’m keen to bring five more in. Whether we get five, I’m not sure, but that will be the aim. Two out, five in.
We’ve got a bit of wheeling and dealing and you might see me out on the training ground with the old window down on deadline day.
It’s one of those times where there is so much that can happen. We thought we had something done yesterday and the player decides to go abroad. It’s tough, but you have to accept you are going to miss out on some.
But it’s an exciting end to the window. We’ve got to get cracking, we’ve got a bit to do and, thankfully, we’ve got until next Tuesday to do that.
I’m sure you can never really enjoy it, but is there the thrill of the chase and the fact you could restructure the way your squad looks? Or is that outweighed by the sheer pain in the backside of it?
Yeah, and also you could still get raided. You’re never out of the clear from a raiding perspective, so you’re focusing on incomings but also you’ve also got to make sure you’ve got everything locked down and secure and until February 1, nothing is done until it’s done and for us, we’ve got some moving parts.
It could end up getting quite spicy and we could end up getting five in, but you could also end up getting disappointed and only doing the two that we’ve got. We’ll be really disappointed if that’s the case, but we’re ready to go in the second half of the season.
We’re going to go a lot younger because I feel the upside of it in the market as it presents itself. No disrespect to the 33, 34 and 35-year-old centre-halves, but they are just not for us and the way I want to play.
Also, I’ve got to take a view to the future in terms of if we get young people in on loan now and they like it here and they do well, as we’ve shown in the past, sometimes you can get them back for a secondary spell. Certainly at Fleetwood, we did that and for us, it’s about building relationships with these elite-level clubs.
They trust us now with some of their talent and that sets us up, not only as a coaching group, but building the trust again in Bristol Rovers as a club that can help to develop young, elite talent.
So, squad-wise for the weekend. You’ve got a couple closer to getting back. Is anybody in contention that hasn’t been?
We thought we’d get a couple maybe getting back on the grass, but they are still going to be a few weeks away from it.
Harry Anderson is back, but Jordy (Rossiter) has had a bit of a setback and he’s not going to be back in the short-term and Gibbo is going to be a bit longer.
Morecambe was one of those games slightly frustrating games that you probably should have won. At their place with the wind, it can make it a very different game which is probably not ideal for the kind of football you want to be playing.
It’s going to be the same for both teams and I always thought if you are a good passing side, you play underneath the wind anyway.
We’ve got to improve in our ball retention. We are built to possess the ball and play and we have to be patient with it.
Going into the back end of this season, we are working on some things which slightly change what we’re doing in terms of our control of the ball, but we feel that will bring us some better defensive structures in the transitional moments.
You want to do well this year and crack on towards the top of the table, but we’ve also got to build a group that is capable of sustaining League One football and building to get out into the Championship.
At this moment in time, I feel if we play that kind of table tennis with teams and we kick it long and they kick it long, it doesn’t suit us and we tend to lose those battles. At Accrington, kick it long, kick it long and Accrington score. We then start playing and we were much the better side. Why didn’t we do that at 0-0?
There has been a huge emphasis from me saying to the lads ‘Look, we’ve got to play with the ball on the floor, we’ve got to get the ball down’.
In the midst of that, who knows what the pitch is like? They’re game was off last week, but if you are a good player, you’ve got to find a way of navigating through pitches and conditions.
Joey, how are you going to navigate the loan cap for the rest of the window? You’ve got four loans and you can have five. Will you take more than that because then you have difficult decisions to make to leave one out of the squad?
Yeah, and we’ve also got a loan player out injured at the moment. He’s not currently fit and there is no guarantee he is going to come back and play any games.
At the minute, we need a bit of space, and ideally you would take permanents, but it’s a tough window to take permanents in January.
You are kind of in the loan market and we will probably have to take a sixth loan, and then if they all get fit, fight that out from there. We are happy, by the way, if all six loans would be fit because then you’ve got an issue.
Maybe you convert one, who knows? I don’t know. There are a few options at play, but we will take a sixth loan and maybe even a seventh.
Can you share any more on the departures? I know Tranmere have been interested in Harvey Saunders.
There have been a few in for him and sniffing around, so that will be for him and his agent.
We’ve had a fee we’re happy with for Harv. He’s a great lad and he’s desperate to go and play.
I kind of want to keep him because we’re a little bit short in areas, but it’s not the right thing to do for the kid and I can’t keep him as an insurance policy for other people getting injured.
He has been a great servant for me in my coaching career. He has done brilliantly, but he is desperate to get on and get playing regularly and I think he’s going to have opportunities to do that.
It allows us to recoup some money that we can invest, hopefully, back in the side.
I guess that makes that hybrid winger-forward a priority position for you?
I’m looking for a centre-half, a left-back, two centre-mids and a left-footer who comes off the right. Will I get all of them? I’m not sure.
The left-footer coming in off the right is going to be tricky. We were trying to get Harvey Vale in and we thought we had a good chance of getting him, but he played for Chelsea in the Papa Johns and he played for Hull, so he couldn’t play for a third club.
I think that is going to be the tricky position. Centre-mids, we can find. Left-back and a centre-half, we can find. That player off the side might be the one where we come up short in pursuit of, but you never know, let’s see what the market presents.
There is a long time to go in this window, we’re only just getting going.
You always say ‘dying embers’ of the window. Is that what you’re looking at?
Hopefully not, it’s never ideal, but you know this market as well as I do. The summer market tends to be calmer and people have got bigger plans.
The January market seems to be, because the season is open, if someone has a bad result this weekend, they are in the market on Monday for something they weren’t, or someone picks an injury up this weekend and someone who was available is no longer available.
There are going to be some moving parts to it. We want to get them before but I’ve got a feeling that if I want five players, we’re definitely going to be in the last 24 hours of the window. Tuesday night is going to be a late night, by the looks of it.
I’m not expecting you to tell me who is playing, but do your goalkeepers know who is the number one?
I don’t think we have a number one. I think we’ve got two good goalkeepers competing for a jersey.
Training, from a goalkeeper’s perspective, has gone up this week. You can see there is competition for places and there is a new kid in town and everyone wants to show that they are the best goalie.
That’s what we want. It certainly drives performance and since the boys have come in, the level has gone up. There will be more added to that and that’s what we need at this point.
That’s why the in January market you clear out the lads who go ‘We’re never getting in the team’ and bringing in lads who are ‘We’re in the team’ and then the lads who were in the team then are going ‘Oh, I mightn’t be in the team anymore’.
It always brings out the best in competitive animals and our boys are no different. Let’s see how it transpires.
Does it feel like that ideal window is in touch for you because you’ve got the lads out that weren’t playing and you have a chance to strengthen?
It was yesterday. Yesterday I thought ‘Here’s the third one in and you can see the fourth and fifth, here we go, we’re in business’.
Was it the winger you missed out on?
No, it wasn’t a winger, it was a centre-half. It’s one of those, I’m in my house yesterday and I get a phone call in the morning and someone was available that we didn’t expect and I was thinking ‘Oh my god, this one will be brilliant’, so I’m phoning to give the good news and say it’s a possibility.
It was someone we felt would go in a little bit higher, a really good option, so we’re buzzing off the back of that and an hour later we get the bad news. We were pretty much 99 per cent there but they have decided to go abroad.
So you’re up and then you’re down, but that’s the market and you’ve got to laugh sometimes.
We will get what we need to get in. We might come up just one short, but if we do, we’ve still got enough in the building to get the job done.
What I’m getting at is you have trimmed the fringes of the squad. You always say you want to move the group on and it feels like the next five days could be a pivotal moment in that.
Huge, just like last January for us was huge. It didn’t seem it at the time with people coming in like ‘Who’s Connolly, who’s Elliot Anderson?’ Nobody knew, but the rest is history.
You’re not going to have a last day of the January window as good as Elliot Anderson every year, but it is a chance to stimulate your group and bring in young talent.
If you bring in a 33, 34 or 35-year-old, everyone is like ‘OK, I know what he does, he’s solid. If you bring in an 18, 19, 20-year-old from Liverpool, Chelsea, Man City, Arsenal or Tottenham, you never know what that is.
They are not all Elliot Anderson by the way because he was a real bring spark to say the least. You’re talking about ‘If Carlsberg did loans’. He was that type of player coming in.
But on the other side, your Connor Taylor types is the key. I would always want to get them in pre-season because it allows them that space to develop, but also their parent clubs have got different ideas for them.
For me, we’re starting to get a good reputation for developing young talent and helping at that next stage of development, which leads to more access as people go ‘Ok, you did that with (Harry) Souttar, you did that with Connor Taylor, well what about if we give you him’.
What I’m finding in this window is a lot of big clubs are a lot more receptive to giving us players, mainly because as a football club we have earned the right to be trusted with these precocious young talents.
It’s interesting to me. They find us so refreshing because they are like ‘If we loan you this player, you are going to have a backline of this age’ and I’m like ‘Yeah, absolutely’. They are like ‘OK, this is not normal’ in terms of most are wanting a bit of experience in there and I can see why.
But I’m in the business of developing young players and educating young players. There are going to be some harem-scarem moments and you are going to have the mistakes that young players make, but the upside of that is how well they can do it when they get and seeing how quickly they can grow when that feeling and confidence hits their bloodstream.
There is nothing like seeing a young player grasp a concept, add it to his game and grow in confidence.
No disrespect to the older players, they don’t tend to have that upside to getting it right. Ok, the other side they have is they don’t have the madness and mistakes in there, but what we do find is they do happen with senior players. It’s not just young players.
I was a young player given an opportunity and it’s important us young coaches take chances on younger players.
If you go for older players, it’s a safe position, but as you know from my short time here, I’m not here for safety. That’s not what we’re about.
It sounds like Jordan Rossiter and Lewis Gibson have had setbacks. Can you explain?
Lewis Gibson hasn’t, but Jordy has had a setback in his rehab, which will prolong him more than we thought. He was back on the grass this week so we were thinking he was going to be two or three weeks from here.
That is not going to be the case now. How long it is, I’m not sure until he speaks to people, but it probably rules him out for the foreseeable.
He’s had a flare up and he needs to speak to the physios and have the scans and find out what that is, but it doesn’t look like he’s going to be back on the grass in the next two weeks, which was the hope.
Lewis is on track from what it was, but he’s still two or three weeks from here. He’s still on track, but the most dangerous point is when they step back out on the grass again. It’s all good and well if they have their rehabilitation until they start twisting and turning.
For me, I have to go ‘They are not going to affect the first team in the next period and we need players in that can do that’.
Taking that extra loan, unfortunately, if everyone’s fit – it’s great for me as a coach – it means somebody misses out on a matchday. I am hoping for that scenario because it means I have a full complement to choose from, albeit somebody will feel like they’ve been kicked in the balls when that happens.
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