Birmingham City manager Wayne Rooney told the Daily Star after Saturday’s game that he was furious with his players at half-time against Sheffield Wednesday.
Rooney was under a lot of pressure coming into this game, having only won one point out of a possible 15 in his first five games as Blues manager.
On paper, that doesn’t look good, but they’ve had some challenges.
They traveled to Middlesbrough, Southampton, and Sunderland during that stretch of games, but they also faced some tough opponents at home, including promotion contenders Hull City and Ipswich Town.
They were expected to win Saturday’s game, not only because they had home advantage, but also because the Owls are at the bottom of the Championship table.
Although they are now managed by Danny Rohl, results have not been great under their current manager, who was brought in to improve results after Xisco Munoz left.
On Saturday, George Byers gave them a 1-0 lead, but Juninho Bacuna equalized in the third minute of stoppage time at the end of the first half to tie the game.
And Jordan James won it for the hosts in the 81st minute, relieving some of the pressure on Wayne Rooney while heaping more on Wednesday, who are in real danger of being relegated back to League One unless they can turn things around quickly.
Blues fought back to tie the game just before halftime, just minutes after conceding.
At the interval, Rooney was furious with his players, telling the Daily Star: “We can’t get caught up in the fans’ reaction – everyone has an opinion and we don’t want to go in 1-0 down but when you’re on the pitch you’ve got to keep your focus and concentration.”
“Forget the fans; my reaction at halftime was unfavorable to the players, which is why my voice has gone!” We didn’t play with the energy I wanted us to in the first half, and I made the players aware of it, but we were much better in the second half. I wasn’t feeling well.
“I thought Sheffield Wednesday pressed well without the ball, but we need to be more composed on the ball because we were too eager to go back to John Ruddy and let him make decisions.”
“I’ve seen an improvement week by week so if that first half was four weeks ago, I could have understood it, but it was unrecognisable to what we’ve been doing during the international break.”
Rooney hasn’t thrown his players under the bus at every opportunity during his tough opening run of fixtures.
In the media, he has remained calm, but he had every right to react in the way he did at the interval because he clearly felt that the team had gone backwards.
Having had an international break to rest, recover and recharge their batteries, there were no excuses for the players not to perform better.
Not only did the break allow them to get their energy levels back, which is crucial for Rooney’s system, but it also allowed the Manchester United legend to implement more of his ideas on the training ground.
With this in mind, it would have been troubling for Rooney to see his team fail to perform well despite those factors working in his team’s favor. Fortunately for Blues’ manager, his team came out on top in the end.
Leave a Reply