Why Doncaster Rovers are finding the EFL Trophy works well for them

You hear it all the time and justifiably so from elite footballers treated like meat by authorities only interested in how they can manufacture more games to squeeze money out of them.

But as he tries to manage an impressively deep League Two squad, the more games the merrier for Doncaster Rovers manager Grant McCann.

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Rovers are through to the knockout stages of the Football League Trophy, a competition which only catches the imagination once Wembley comes into view. A tortuous group stage polluted by under-21 teams from the big academies, shunned by fans and used for rotation by League One and Two sides takes three low-key matches to filter out 32 of 64 teams. It is not fit for purpose.

But it is working for McCann, a winner and goalscoring runner-up in past finals as a player.

"Would we have gone a little bit lesser on the bench if the FA Youth game hadn't been on the previous night? Possibly," he admitted after the 3-1 win at Barnsley which clinched progression. "You'd have seen the likes of Straughan-Brown, Kasper WIlliams etc.

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"We used it for the lads who played on Saturday to get minutes to where the boys who trained earlier in the day got to. The lads who didn't play, the likes of Billy Sharp, did work after the game.

"We've created really good opportunities for players to come in, like we saw on Saturday (at Bradford City in League Two) when Jack Senior hadn't been involved and came straight into the team.

"For the squad we have it's great. It doesn't seem to be supported, this competition, you saw the crowd.

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FRINGE BENEFITS: Doncaster Rovers have been able to keep fringe players like Jack Senior sharpFRINGE BENEFITS: Doncaster Rovers have been able to keep fringe players like Jack Senior sharp
FRINGE BENEFITS: Doncaster Rovers have been able to keep fringe players like Jack Senior sharp

"But I think the further you go, we got to the quarter-final last season, the more people start getting intrigued by it.

"A trip to Wembley is what everyone wants and every year when the final comes along there's 50, 60, 70,000 there."

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