Tony Mowbray has told his players to keep believing in themselves as they look to end a run of four straight defeats.

Rovers have lost each of their four fixtures this month, having won their quartet of January matches, and sit 14th in the table ahead of Saturday’s trip to Birmingham.

Breaking down each of the last four games, Mowbray believes the first half against Middlesbrough apart, performances haven’t been of an unacceptable level.

The players debriefed that game on Monday, and Mowbray said: “We had a really, really productive meeting, a few hours discussing everything after Middlesbrough. As I’ve always said, a real strength of this group is the character and personalities within it.

“It makes it easier. I think we all came to the conclusion we need to stick together, keep working hard, believing in what we do.

“When you break the games down, I think in my view, only the first half against Middlesbrough in the run we’ve had, has been poor. Even the second half at Brentford, until the third goal went in we were very much in the game.

“There haven’t been too many spells where we need to be overly concerned.

“Against Bristol City, who are on a great run, we more than matched them for long spells and lost very late on.

“Reading, we talked about that last week, and the performance generally, apart from two isolated incidents where we lost goals, was pretty strong.

“The second half against Middlesbrough, if we’re looking for positives, with 10 men it was pretty positive.

“We need to keep to the same standards and work ethic and everything else we normally bring and we’ll be fine I’ll be sure.”

Rovers lost Darragh Lenihan to a knee injury in the defeat at Brentford which is set to rule him out for up to eight weeks.

And Mowbray added: “I think there are extenuating circumstances. I think Lenihan is a loss to our group, he brings aggression and athleticism at the back end of the team. The other defenders are a bit more cultured, more ball orientated, rather than a destroyer. We probably missed some aggression defensively which isn’t readily replaceable in our group.

“They are fine margins, the odd error in tight, tight matches has fallen against us, whereas the month earlier they were probably going for us.

“But you have to look at the season, it’s easy to take little segments. We have no points in the last four but you could look and say, we’ve got 12 points from the last eight games. That’s 1.5 points a game which would get you 69 points if you do that over 46 games which isn’t a bad total.

“The answer is to stay calm, keep working hard, believing in each other, don’t let the outside noise get in the way of what we’re trying to achieve.”