Boss speaks pre-game about how Rovers players need to help themselves.
When asked by the assembled media whether his patience had snapped, following Saturday’s defeat at the hands of Fleetwood, Paul Dickov was unflappable in his assertions.“Yes,” he flatly responded.
“We know it’s a small squad but I wanted to give everyone a fair crack of the whip. There aren’t many of them who can come to me and say they haven’t had a fair chance,” the Scot said prior to Tuesday night’s home clash with Leyton Orient.
“We seem to have either eleven players really at it or eight or nine who are not and you’re not going to pick up results doing that. When we go behind we’re looking at other people to help us out rather than dealing with it yourself and the times we have got results is when people have taken responsibility.”
Dickov’s honesty has struck a chord with many ahead of Rovers’ long awaited return to the more familiar surrounds of the Keepmoat Stadium – where they have not played for nearly a month – and he hinted at the potential to add players to a relatively lightweight squad.
“We need to get at least one in and possibly someone who is more of a leader around the changing rooms than we’ve currently got. We’re in talks with a couple of players at the moment but it’s early days,” he said.
“There’ll be a few changes personnel wise because we need to get back on track. We’ve not had a home game for a while and we need to get a performance and a result in.
“We go from the sublime to the ridiculous at times and we follow good performances up with bad ones and we have to sort it out because we know we should be better than that.”
Dickov was less than impressed with his side’s 3-1 loss at Highbury on Saturday and criticised his players for being “too nice”.
“We’ve got to realise that when we go to good football teams that we’ve got to be resilient before we play our football and it looked as though we wanted to go there and play nicely and football doesn’t work like that.
“We’ve spoken about it and drawn a line under it because we have to focus on Tuesday night.
“They [Orient] looked sound defensively, they were organised and worked hard and we’ll probably get the same.”