Blues boss Kieran McKenna says his Town players need to stick to the plan, keep doing the same things and trust in how they train and play football, and just try to do that a little better during frustrating games such as Tuesday’s 0-0 home draw with Cheltenham.
Town played as well as they have all season in the first half but after the break, while they still had most of the ball and the better of the chances, McKenna admitted that they hadn’t matched the display in the opening 45 minutes.
"The Northern Irishman has previously spoken about his team needing to stay patient in games when they’re playing well but having not yet found a goal.
"That’s definitely a part of it,” he said when asked whether that was the case against the Robins.
"On Tuesday, I think there were different parts of it, it wasn’t just a mental thing or a physical thing, it wasn’t a tactical thing, it can be a combination of different things, and to be honest, it is the nature of football.
"You’re not going to dominate games for 90 minutes all the time. When you are dominating games, you want to try and take your opportunities, and when you’re not dominating and it’s not quite as clear cut or you don’t have a lead or the other team are growing into the game, you need to stick to the plan, keep doing the same things, trust how we train, trust how we play football and just try and do things a little bit better than we’re doing.
"So each game is different. On Saturday, we had a really tough first half against Burton where we played well, but Burton also played well and really brought the game to us. Then we kicked on and had a fantastic second half.
"On Tuesday, we had a fantastic first half in terms of a lot of the aspects of the performance but didn’t manage to get a goal and in the second half I still felt we were the better team and had the better chances, but the game was a little bit more even, and we didn’t dominate as much as we did in the first half.
"I think it’s just understanding those different game states, understanding that a game is not going to go your way for 90 minutes, we want to control as much of it as we can, but that there are another 11 players on the pitch and they are playing with their plan, and they are fully motivated as well, and they are going to have their spell, and it’s how well we manage those spells.
"Whether it’s the start of the game or the end of the game, how we can manage those spells, stay on process, keep doing the right things, keep making the right decisions and the more we can do that over 90 minutes, the more of the game we’ll have and the more chance we’ll have of winning the game.”
After Tuesday’s game, McKenna spoke about his team showing signs of fatigue in the second half, did he mean that in a general sense or that it was as a result of the first-half display?
"I think it was a little bit of both,” he reflected. "When you put as much energy into the first half as we did, we’d made a big focus before the game about making a fast start and the energy and the aggression that we’d put into the first half and trying to get the support and everybody behind us with a fast start.
"And I thought the players did really well with that. I thought we put a massive effort into the first half and I think more regularly than not that would have led to having a one or two-goal lead at half-time.
"When you don’t get that reward, the other team get a motivation and an energy-lift going into the second half and it’s natural that it’s hard to sustain that level for the whole 90 minutes, and it’s probably inevitable that the opposition would also have their spells in the game and would also get a little bit of a boost whenever we hadn’t managed to take some of our chances.
"I think probably an accumulation of the usual grind at this time of the season, I think the players have put in a massive physical effort over the last couple of months, the numbers and the data would show that our sprints and our high-speed running and a lot of our physical parameters have increased markedly over the last couple of months.
"So there’s been a big physical output and at times that’s going to catch up with you on a Saturday-Tuesday fixture.
"We have a big squad, we have a fit group, we have a good support team behind the scenes here and we have good recovery processes, so I’m very confident that we will be able to have the boys fit and ready for the games and I know going into Saturday they seem to have recovered well and are raring to go for the next one.”