Getting thumped by Boro on Tuesday, The Tigers drew against Millwall who were very high above us in the league, and looking for their eighth win of the season. It was close, but it was not to be again this time but there were lots of positives to take away from the game.
With ex Hull City player - Liam Rosenior - put in charge after the Boro game, the team had three changes; Ozan Tufan, Brandon Fleming and Greg Docherty were replaced for Ryan Longman, Alfie Jones and Dimitrios Pelkas. The team was back to how it was when we got those away wins the other week (except for Oscar Estupinan) and I think that they should not have tried to change it.
In the opening ten minutes, we took control and our best chance of the game came from a shot from Estupinan that was taken from the edge of the box and forced a save from the Millwall keeper. Our next chance came quite quickly, Ryan Woods took a shot from outside the box that landed near two of our players; unfortunately no strong connection was made and the keeper made another comfortable save. We were definitely better in attack and I hope this is what Rosenior means when he says ‘he wants to play football in a different way to other teams’. Millwall had a few decent chances to go in front as they had a free kick that just went wide of the target. We were not making that many errors but we do need to work on keeping the ball as whenever we do the other teams always turn it into a brilliant goal scoring opportunity; however, fortunately, we did not concede when we did this. In the 37th minute our top goal scorer, Estupinan, made a dangerous challenge that resulted in him getting a straight red card and a three match ban. After this, the rest of the first period went to Millwall.
Goalless at half time and it is a better result than previous games.
The second half was challenging and it really tested our defence, which I was worried about as this season they have been useless in that department. For the rest of the match, it was Millwall who were the ones in charge of the ball and they looked like they wanted the three points more than we did. Their non-stop attacking meant that we had to battle for the rest of the 90 minutes to try and prevent Millwall from taking the three points. We successfully achieved this as we kept the clean sheet and we were able to take the point back to East Yorkshire. It was a scary half to watch as Millwall were all over us and whenever we had the ball we did nothing with it and within seconds it got taken from us. Huge difference from the first half as we had gone from threatening in attack to not even being able to get past the halfway line. Losing Oscar early on in the match definitely punctured our attack and throughout the remainder of the match you would have thought that the whole squad was made up of defenders as none of the attackers looked like they wanted to score. Millwall did have a goal ruled off and I have to say we defended exquisitely and I wish we could do this in every game.
It ended 0-0 at The Den and for the Millwall fans it was a tough point to take but for the City fans they would happily take it.
For me, this was a well earned point and at least we did not concede. Compared with other matches, we would have got battered if we tried to defend all game, so has Rosenior already made a difference? I hope so and I hope he can build a team that can win and draw constantly, instead of this losing run that we are on at the moment. At the start of the season, we kept up the streak but one loss on the road made the difference and it affected us for the rest of the season. Our next game is Cardiff away on Tuesday and I am eager to see what happens.