Town boss Mick McCarthy says Dean Gerken’s place in the side for today’s game with Reading was never in doubt, despite his error in last week’s 1-0 defeat at Millwall. The Town keeper misjudged Lions’ right-back Ryan Fredericks’s mis-hit cross five minutes before the break and the debutant claimed the game’s only goal.
"He’s playing,” McCarthy confirmed. "It was never in doubt at all. He’s been different class. He’s been outstanding.
"I have to say, when that cross came in I thought ‘Happy days, that’s going over the top, he’s made a mess of that’. Unfortunately for me, Gerks thought that as well and he’s the one that matters.
"But, you know what, it happens sometimes. It’s not that he’s playing badly, it’s not that he’s dropping crosses, he’s not missing shots, that’s just one of them, a misjudgement. And let me tell you, it’s happened to me.”
Speaking earlier this month, current second-choice keeper Scott Loach said he felt he was left out of the side having made only one mistake, how does McCarthy feel those situations differ?
"Because I want to play Dean Gerken. There are some times when one player will see what I say to another player or do with another player and if one of them’s in the team, it won’t matter, the one that’s out of the team will always see that it’s a little bit unjust, or not quite sure the manager got it right. Unlucky.
"There are other times when I just have to say ‘I’m picking you, not you’ because I fancy you playing in the team today’. Or ‘I’m hanging my hat on you, not you’ and they’re going to have to take it. And I tell them and that’s the way it is. If they disagree with me, unlucky.”
He says the type of error Gerken made last week isn’t something which can be worked on in training: "We can’t put crosses in from the right for Gerks to tip over when we know he does that on a regular basis and he’s been brilliant, he’s been absolutely outstanding.
"What you can’t do is replicate the mistakes to try and put them right but we show them. We get them in to have a look at it.
"The first QPR goal, we let them out of the corner, so we make sure everybody knows what their jobs are and that he shouldn’t have been able to do that - could we get out quicker to him?
"The other goals were mistakes. Look at Preston, they were soppy, soft goals that we gave away. Things that we don’t do on a normal day or on a regular basis.
"But you can’t replicate it, say ‘Head that this time rather than miss it’, they know that. But we show them, perhaps show the build-up to it and how we could have stopped it. We work on it, but not necessarily on the training ground.”
Looking back at the defeat at the Den, he says the goal was the game’s pivotal moment: "I thought up until the goal going in we were just as good as Millwall. I thought they started well, I changed it and went 4-3-3 and it just stifled the game.
"Their shape was causing us a few problems, when we went to 4-3-3 it stopped that. It was a flukey goal and it changed the whole complexion of the game, the crowd, the players, I think they then looked a bit more up for it.
"We’d had a disturbed week. We don’t make excuses, I know I’m as honest as anybody and say if we’ve played badly, but we had the Tuesday game. Not everyone made the trip but we travelled on the Monday, so the players who didn’t travel didn’t train with the first team on Tuesday or Wednesday.
"The lads who had played didn’t train on Thursday, so the first time we did anything was on the Friday, so we were a little bit disjointed and it didn’t help.
"But, as I said to the players, I’m not making that an excuse for it. However, I think when you go 1-0 down sometimes, and in the manner in which the goal went in, Millwall got a lift from it and I think it just knocked us and we never recovered. We didn’t play well after that.”