3/1 To Win
Wayne Rooney wants Derby County to keep momentum on their side after picking up back-to-back wins for the first time this season.
Derby climbed out of the Sky Bet Championship’s bottom three after picking up maximum points from their recent clashes against AFC Bournemouth and Queens Park Rangers.
A 1-0 win at home to Bournemouth, thanks to a goal from Krystian Bielik, was followed up with the same scoreline in West London last Saturday after Colin Kazim-Richards netted the only goal.
Following a rare full week of training, Rooney is keen to see the Rams continue to move in the right direction when they welcome Bristol City to Pride Park Stadium on Saturday (3pm kick-off).
“We haven’t had a game in midweek and it has given us more time to prepare for Saturday,” Rooney said in an interview with RamsTV.
“We’ve had more days training with the team, which is always helpful, and we’ve had a bit of rest thrown in for the players.
“The lads have been great, as always. It has been a strange couple of weeks to say the least, but the lads have dealt with it really well on the training pitch in the games.
“We’ve got two wins in the last two games and I couldn’t have asked for any more from them.”
He added: “I’m not really looking at the league table at the moment and I think the one thing the last week has done, with our results, is it has brought us a little bit closer to the teams above us. We have to just keep doing our job and see where we are in a few weeks.”
Derby, under Rooney’s management both on a temporary basis and following his permanent appointment earlier this month, have been much harder to beat.
They’ve kept seven clean sheets from 12 matches and conceded five goals during that time.
While the 35-year-old achieved great success as a player in the attacking areas of the pitch, he is well aware of the importance of being effective from a defensive aspect.
“For me as a player, in my whole career I enjoyed defending,” Rooney explained. “I wanted to attack and create and score goals, but I actually enjoyed defending too. It’s a mindset that you need to get into all the players, that defending is a big part of the game.
“You give yourself a better chance of winning games if you do that. I think it was important that the first thing we set out to do was to be hard to beat. Winning games 1-0 is nice but we’d like it to be a bit easier on the bench in the final five or ten minutes!
“Keeping clean sheets has to be the focal point of what you do.”
Derby were beaten 1-0 at Bristol City earlier in the season, during a time when the Rams found results hard to come by, but have certainly improved on the pitch since then.
“I think we played well, it was a good performance,” Rooney said when looking back on the game at Ashton Gate. “It was a good performance but disappointing result.
“We have had good performances and lost the games, but I think now the players are showing a resilience and a willingness to defend and keep clean sheets. Then it is on the attacking players to go and score and win us the games.”
