BLACKBURN Rovers boss Gary Bowyer insists he will continue to be ‘bold’ by selecting two up top.

Rudy Gestede and Jordan Rhodes now have 35 league goals between them for the campaign after the former hit a hat-trick in Saturday’s 3-3 home draw with Nottingham Forest.

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Watford’s Troy Deeney and Odion Ighalo, with 20 goals each, are the only strike partnership to have outscored the Rovers duo in the Championship during the 2014/15 campaign.

But despite having one of the most feared forward lines outside of the Premier League, Bowyer’s ninth-placed side go into tonight’s home clash with relegation-threatened Millwall a distant 15 points behind the play-offs.

One of the major reasons why they find themselves so far off the top six is a soft underbelly that Forest exposed on Saturday.

It was not the first time this season that Rovers struggled to contain a top-half team that operated a five-man midfield behind a lone striker at Ewood Park.

But Bowyer, whose use of 4-5-1 brought clean sheets away to high-flying Bournemouth and in the FA Cup away to Liverpool, said: “We’re bold, we play 4-4-2, there are not a lot of teams who do that, and if we changed it and played one up front people would say, ‘why don’t you play two up front?’

“I feel with the strike-force we’ve got, we’ve got to play two up front, and cause teams a handful, and what that means is that everybody has to put a shift in on the defensive side.

“I certainly think there are games when you have to be selective, we went to Bournemouth with one up top and that worked for us.

“But that one up top has got to be the right one.

“You need to have somebody up there who can link play up so that you can build. Or you have someone with pace, like Kingy (Josh King), who can exploit a clearance or things like that and get in behind.

“It’s an important role playing one up top on their own and it has to be the right person but with the strikers we’ve got available, it gears us to play two up top.”

Whatever system relegation-threatened Millwall deploy tonight, Bowyer is expecting a fiercely competitive contest.

Rewind almost exactly two years ago and the boot was on the other foot as Rovers went to the Den and recorded a 2-1 victory that effectively secured their survival.

“It’s ironic, a couple of years ago we were going to Millwall, having to win to stay up, and now the roles are reversed, so we know exactly what to expect because of what position we were in back then,” said Bowyer, who will be hoping to do his former club Rotherham United, who are four points above the third-from-bottom Lions, a favour tonight.

“They’ll be coming here fighting for their lives, so it might not be a pretty game, but it’s all about us and what we do.

“We’ve got to get the ball into the box, like we did on Saturday, which we did ever so well, but then be smarter in how we defend and make sure we work ever so hard to try and keep a clean sheet.”