Birmingham City: Alex McLeish warns he can't keep all his players happy

Nov 25 2010 by Colin Tattum, Birmingham Mail

ALEX McLeish has confessed it has become difficult to keep all his Blues players happy.

Yet the manager wouldn’t want it any other way. Lee Bowyer responded in the kind of manner Eck wanted after getting a chance again because of Craig Gardner’s injury.

And he said Matt Derbyshire, who has been virtually a spectator from the bench the past couple of months, has been catching his eye in training.

“That’s the hardest thing when the team is virtually unchanged every week, the morale of the other guys,” McLeish said.

“It’s so difficult to keep everybody happy. Guys like Lee Bowyer, Matt Derbyshire, Kevin Phillips, David Murphy and so on, they just want to go and play.

“They are proud fellas and it’s difficult in terms of rotation. You think ‘rotate it and keep it fresh’, but you make wholesale changes, the team can be disrupted.

“We’ve seen that in some of the cup games. We haven’t played brilliantly but the onus has been on us to win these games, whereas in the Premier League you can set out tactically to say ‘right, we will frustrate them, keep them quiet, and nick something’.

“When the onus is on us to attack the smaller teams, we just lack that wee bit of guile.

“Bowyer’s a good pro,” McLeish continued. “He chapped my door at the beginning when Gardner took his place and it would be great if the players didn’t do that, and went along happily. You wouldn’t get any hassle.

“But, at the same time, if you’ve got players who don’t want to play, you’re really struggling. It was just the way I saw it at the time and Bow, understandably, wasn’t delighted.

‘‘But he’s knuckled down, he has stuck to the training and trained at a great level last week. He probably saw that there was a window of opportunity with Gardner injured in the Man City game.

“He looked very sharp and he never put a foot wrong at the weekend against Chelsea.