McKenna: We Need to Take the Positives Saturday, 11th Feb 2023 18:26 Boss Kieran McKenna believes Town should take the positives from their 2-2 home draw with Sheffield Wednesday and use their fightback and second-half display to build their confidence, mindset and belief. The Blues found themselves 2-0 down to the Owls after 34 minutes, Conor Chaplin having missed a penalty after Wes Burns had been elbowed in the face off the ball by Marvin Johnson as a corner came over. Referee Geoff Eltringham gave the spot-kick but told Town players he was unable to identify who the player was who had thrown the elbow and show a red card. A brilliant free-kick from Nathan Broadhead, his first goal for the club, brought the Blues back into it before Leif Davis’s free-kick after the break completed Town’s comeback. “I think we need to take a balanced view but primarily my view is that we need to take the positives,” McKenna said regarding the match. “From a really difficult situation in the game, probably a difficult point in our season, to be fair, to be 2-0 down against a team of that strength and that experience on that run, who haven’t conceded a goal in so long, to come back in the game, to get the goals, to get back to the performance that we wanted in the second half and to end up coming out with a point and it could have been three, I think we have to take the positives from that and use that to build our confidence, our mindset and our belief in what we’re capable of as a team. “There’s no doubt about it, the penalty knocked the stuffing out of our players, out of the crowd a little bit and gave them a big boost. “And that’s only doubled then when they scored a really, really good goal shortly after that with the type of quality that they produce and that made for a really difficult moment in the game and a moment where we could have given up on the game when they got the second. “I didn’t think we handled the situation very well but I know that we can look back on that and learn from it and the main thing that we needed to do was what we did in the build-up to the free-kick award, which was get back to our details, get back to controlling the game and playing how we play, not allowing the importance of the game or the atmosphere or the game state to dictate what we were doing in the game. “And when we managed to do that, we won the free-kick, scored a brilliant free-kick and that was the template for what we needed to do in the second half and managing to do that, I thought we put in a really strong performance in the second half, got the goal and probably deserved over the course of the second half to have got more.” Broadhead’s free-kick saw the Blues end the half with their tails up in contrast to the earlier mood. “It certainly gave everyone a boost, gave the players a boost, gave the atmosphere a boost and gave belief to everyone,” McKenna continued. “A fantastic moment for him to get his first goal and was hopefully a really important for us in the season.” He says he’d not seen Broadhead score a similar goal at Playford Road: “I’ve not seen him take a free-kick before. “He’s not taken them in training, I’ve seen him score all type of goals from outside the box, headers and inside the box. But I can’t say we knew that he had that free-kick in him, so that’s a big bonus.” The Blues boss added: “We knew what we needed to do in the second half, we knew that we needed to get back to doing what we do well and playing how we play and taking care of our details, and when we did that we knew that we’d start to dominate the game again and we did that from the first minute of the second half and continued that through most of the half apart from the spell when they were putting in long throw after long throw into the box. “They do that very well and you have to stand up to that and credit to the players that we stood up to that side of it. “I think there are big positives to take in the goal and the reaction in the second half and the general performance in the second half.” Regarding the manner of the goals conceded, the Northern Irishman said: “I think from our point of view, the first goal from them is incredible individual quality, that’s why they’re at the top of the league. “A ball down the side on a quick free-kick, but [Josh] Windass is on his wrong foot, he whips a beauty of a ball in and [Michael] Smith runs across and heads in. If any striker in world football scored that header we’d all be purring about it. I think you have to give credit to their individual quality for the first goal. “Our reaction to that then wasn’t good and the second goal was a really poor goal to concede, how we dealt with the long ball, how we dealt with the ball onto the right side of our defence, how we stop the cross coming in and then how we defended the cross was disappointing. “We have to look back at that but I think the first goal, and the penalty miss, were two such big momentum swings that aren’t easy to handle. “If you look at Sheffield Wednesday and the experience they have and the winning run that they’re on, if you look at how they handled us getting the goal back and how they handled us getting the second goal, I don’t think you could say that they handled it very well. “They showed nervousness and anxiety and pressure in their performance as well. We’re dealing with human beings. Whether that’s a vastly experienced team like Sheffield Wednesday who have been in this situation or whether it’s us who have got, being truthful, quite a few young players on the pitch, who are experiencing a situation like this for the first time. “We’re dealing with an emotional game of human beings and it’s not always easy to handle those setbacks and I think we can take strength from how we handled it today in the second half.” In the second half Wednesday sought to run down the clock and McKenna was asked whether a side who went into the match at the top of the table - and are now second - doing that was a compliment to his team. “No, I think the position they’re in in the league, there’s no doubt they’ll see it as a good point before the game started,” he continued. “The time-wasting goes on, probably on 65 minutes when we had big momentum in the game, someone sits down in the penalty area for two minutes, takes another two minutes to walk off the pitch and comes back on. That’s what the teams at this level do. “It’s not easy to find a solution to it for the authorities but I think it damages the spectacle and the product and the level of the football but Sheffield Wednesday certainly aren’t the only team that do it, so that’s not to say that personally against them, that’s just something that I think the league need to keep working on.” Reflecting on the result and scorelines elsewhere, McKenna said: “I think if you take the two games against Sheffield Wednesday over the course of the season and say we’ve had two 2-2 draws, over the course of a 46-game season that’s not going to be decisive in your outcome at the end of the season either way. “Of course, there’s a strange symmetry to both games in us being 2-0 up at their place and them being 2-0 up at our place. I think the point across both games is not decisive for me. “What we have to use as decisiveness is the way that we changed the narrative at 2-0 down. We could have let that narrative, the feeling that we’ve missed our chance by missing the penalty and the other team have taken their first good moment in the game, scoring an incredible goal. We could have let that narrative get on top of us and dictate the outcome of the game and the outcome of the season. “What we have to try and do is use the way that we changed that, the way we changed the situation and use that as a positive to strengthen us for the rest of the season, and if we do that hopefully today could be a decisive day in the season for us.” Prior to going off, Broadhead had undergone treatment but McKenna allayed any concerns there might be that the recent signing from Everton had picked up a knock. “Just cramp, I think,” he said. “He’s adapting to a different style of play, he’s come from a team [Wigan where he was on loan] who are at the bottom of the league, operating in a low possession, low pressure, low block team to coming to play in a team that wants to play really, really high intensity football. “And I think there’s an adaptation there for all the new players who come to our clubs that I’ve seen really clearly and I think he’s in that process of adaptation but he’s also shown enough across the two home games here to show the individual quality that he’s got and why he could be an important player for us.”
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