Sheffield United 3 Blackburn Rovers 0: Managers' reaction as brilliant Blades batter Blackburn

Fair play to the ‘keeper for his performance, he made so many saves point-blank, even the one with Rhian at the end. For me he was their man of the match.

From our point of view he was involved in all the good things we did, he created his own chances as well as being on the end of them and to get that many in a game just shows the hard work everyone’s been doing with him. For me that’s evidence of it. It’s not the finish; he knows I’m never satisfied with him but it’s a step forward.

In 40 games time we’re still top of the league, I’d be delighted. But now it’s about performance and trying to build something and get everyone up to speed. We’re not going to do it with 11, we’ll do it with 23 and we want everyone available.

I don’t want to sound disrespectful to Blackburn but we’re not at that stage about strongest in the league and it’s about us and our performance anyway. At that performance we’d have given anyone a game. We’ll try and deliver that level of performance every week.

Really good. From start to finish I thought we were excellent, we were good with the ball and had an aggression without it to win it back and make it difficult for Blackburn. So we were really good.

They are one of the favourites to go up so it was difficult.

The group is stretched, it’s just facts. We are a project and there’ll be bumps in the road. We lost more than eight players and only three came in so far and you can see that.

It’s always low when you lose a game. As a manager and player and fan you’re disappointed. You want to have a good performance so you’re always disappointed to lose.

I think it worked for us. We changed the formation and the first 15,20 minutes of the second half it was okay. We had a bit of momentum for sure in that period.

Thomas is a brilliant goalkeeper. He’s disappointed with every goal he concedes, and he’s a very ambitious boy.

We knew it was going to be tough. They have a lot of excellent players and an excellent squad and we knew it would be difficult. I think the squad looked a bit stretched. We had a spell in the second half when we were in the game, and I think you can see we’re playing a lot of games at the moment and you can see the squad is stretched. I feel sorry for the fans who travelled with us and it’d be good to boost the dressing room with a couple of players.