Gary Rowett believes that Derby County can take positives from their goalless draw with Millwall on Tuesday night, but he picked out the one aspect that was missing from the performance at The Den.
The Rams made it 10 games unbeaten in the Sky Bet Championship but it was the second stalemate in a row, following on from the draw at Pride Park Stadium against Bristol City over a week ago.
Rowett was pleased with some parts of the display, but he admitted that his side were missing the something special that would have allowed them to take all three points.
He told RamsTV: “We moved the ball and got into some terrific positions but we just couldn’t find that last little bit of quality.
“We can’t be too disappointed, I was relatively pleased with most of the performance.
“It was competitive and we did the dirty side of the game, but we just needed a little bit of magic and unfortunately we couldn’t come up with that when we needed it.
“We accept that we have to show a little bit more composure and quality to win this type of game.”
Ikechi Anya made his first league appearance since August and he had the ball in the net late on, but the Derby celebrations were halted by an offside flag.
Having seen a replay, the boss can appreciate why the flag went up, but he couldn’t hide his frustration with the call.
“I can understand why it’s been given as offside, because Ikechi breaks the line and he’s behind the defenders but the reality is that he was onside,” he explained.
“You can see that the centre-back is playing Ikechi onside, it was a very good pass from Cameron through the defender’s legs.”
The transfer deadline closes on Wednesday, and Rowett gave his thoughts on any potential business that the club may be looking to complete.
He said: “We’ve got good players that haven’t had much game time, we saw that when Ikechi came on.
“I don’t want to sign another player just for the sake of it, we want quality, and if we can get that then we’ll bring it into the building.
“Sometimes, the valuations become very expensive so we’ll try to do what we can.”
