Tony Mowbray says financial reasons have played a role in Rovers have to ‘bin’ the identity they had moved been moving towards and are now focused on finding different ways of winning.

Rovers had the third highest possession average across the Championship last season, despite finishing 15th, contrasted to this season where they sit bottom of those standings.

Yet they moved into the top six with a second successive clean sheet as they held Barnsley to a 0-0 draw at Oakwell last week, a meeting of the Championship’s two youngest squads.

Mowbray feels finance impacted on his recruitment plans and as such, impacted on the playing style, having move towards a more defensive and counter-attacking approach which he feels suits more the options at his disposal.

He said: “I talked over the last year about trying to create an identity where when the manager leaves, you don’t have to chuck 20 players out because the new manager wants entirely different players.

“What you want as a football club is to have a structure of how you want your club to progress. Do you want to be ball-orientated or do you want to be direct? Do you just want to develop good footballers because if you sell to the Premier League, they have to be able to do the things that Premier League players can do.

“Or if you don’t want to sell, get out of this league then you get some agricultural players that will fight until they die and grind out results for you.

“It’s just trying to create an identity. I know it’s not the club’s fault but those processes have stopped a little bit because of the financial situation we find ourselves in.

“I felt with our purchases over the last few years we were trying to create a certain football team, this summer we’ve almost had to bin that and look at the players we’ve got and try to find a way to win football matches.”

The return to fitness of Sam Gallagher will boost the height within the Rovers ranks, a welcome boost against a Cardiff side whose set play threat is well known, the Bluebirds having also played the most long balls in the division.

On the make-up of his squad, small in age and stature, he said: “That’s where we are, I’ve always said, when you employ men in football you have to pay them, because they’re men with mortgages, cars and a lifestyle and you have to pay them a man’s wage.

“If you sign kids from Liverpool who are trying to get an opportunity to get their career going and to get onto the pitch infront of a crowd, rather than just being really good in the Under-18s and Under-23s, it’s a different kettle of fish.

“They’re searching for the opportunity to show what they can do, and they don’t really cost you what it costs you to sign a 28-year-old from a Premier League club who want as much of their salary back as they can get.

“My job has been to get a team on the pitch with the attributes and assets that fill different positions to play the way we’ve decided to play and at this moment they’re fighting and working hard.

“Ayala’s fitness has been a crucial factor that we can compete and he was brought as a cog in the wheel, a centre half who could head it and dominate, something for a few years I didn’t really think we had, but last year he played 10 games.

“Let’s see where we go, we should just try and play every game, Cardiff has been the only focus, if we can get three points we’ll stay up the top end of the table, if we get beat then we’ll drop into the middle, and we’ll see how we go.”