Birmingham City manager Wayne Rooney said the subs were the difference as Ipswich Town came back from 2-0 down to draw 2-2 at St Andrew’s yesterday.
Rooney’s Blues appeared to be on their way to their first win under his management, leading 2-0 with just over ten minutes remaining.
Marcus Harness came off the bench to grab a brace and save a point for high-flying Town.
And Rooney claimed that once his players began to tire, the players he brought off the bench didn’t do enough to keep the lead.
“Obviously disappointed in the end with the result having been two goals up,” he told Birmingham Live, “but there’s a lot of positives in today’s game which I was really pleased with.”
“Physically, we’re trying to improve and get better so we can maintain that intensity for a longer period of time.”
“But I think once we got tired, Ipswich took control of the game and pushed us back, and we couldn’t hold on.” In the end, we were disappointed, but there were many positives.
“We had some good chances on the breakaway as well, and maybe with a little more care in the final third we can do a little better, but I can’t fault the lads.”
“The only thing I can say is that some of the lads who came on off the bench didn’t do enough.” If you are not in the starting 11, you must be prepared to come on. I emphasize this to players all the time.
“The lads worked extremely hard to put us in this position, and when you come off the bench, you have to do better than a few of us did.” That’s something we should think about and work on.
“I think we all need to improve on the ball quality; it has to improve throughout the team.” This week has been all about how we play without the ball, how we play on the front foot and make it difficult for Ipswich.
“However, when you make changes and bring players into the game, they have to pick that up, especially when Ipswich were starting to gain control, and give us that energy to keep doing what we were doing.”
“I just felt like there were a couple of players who didn’t do much for us.”
“Their subs made a difference, but I didn’t think ours did, and you can look at it in different ways.”
“Ideally where I want to be is making changes for tactical reasons, not necessarily for physical reasons, but listen, the way I want them to play is different and it does take a lot more energy to do that and we’re constantly trying to build that up.”
