Millwall's Coburn Optimistic for Season Turnaround
Josh Coburn has barely been on the pitch this season, but he’s seen enough to believe Millwall’s campaign is far from drifting off course.
Five wins from 14 games. Thirteenth in the Championship. A far cry from last season’s surge to third, when they missed automatic promotion by a single point and then fell to Hull City in the play-off semi-finals. On paper, it looks like a hangover.
Inside the camp, Coburn insists it feels more like a pause.
Injuries bite, rhythm breaks
Alex Neil has spent the early months of the season juggling absentees rather than line-ups. Coburn, Tristan Crama, Casper De Norre, Mihailo Ivanovic, Ryan Leonard and Massimo Luongo have all been missing for long stretches, stripping the side of its spine and any sense of continuity.
Coburn himself has managed only six appearances. His latest return came on Tuesday night, thrown on as a substitute in a bruising 3-0 defeat to an in-form Birmingham City. Hardly the ideal stage to ease back in.
“I started the season really well, and felt really good,” he told BBC Radio London, the frustration obvious between the lines. This was supposed to be his full, uninterrupted campaign. Instead, it has been another stop-start story, saved only by the timing of the long international break, which has limited the number of games he has actually missed.
He jokes that the medical staff are sick of him. “I think the physios hate me to be honest because I always try and push myself as much as possible, and I always try and get back a week early.” It’s the kind of line that says as much about his mentality as his misfortune.
Lessons from last season’s lay-off
Coburn knows this road. The 23-year-old lost three months of last season to a hamstring injury, then came back and ripped through the run-in, scoring eight goals in Millwall’s final 18 league matches.
That spell has become his reference point.
“There are little things you can work on when you're not fit,” he said, reflecting on how that previous absence sharpened him rather than dulled him. The work in the shadows paid off once he returned, and he finished the campaign looking like one of the division’s most dangerous forwards.
He is trying to repeat the trick now, only this time with the added caution that comes from experience. The temptation to rush back is always there, especially when the table looks tight and the team feels short of cutting edge. But he knows the real disaster would be another breakdown.
“Especially with it being so early on in the campaign, you don't want to be rushing back too quickly and get another injury. That's the worse case scenario, you need to make sure your body is ready.”
Right now, he says he feels “really good” and wants to “kick on”. For Millwall, that phrase carries weight. A fully fit Coburn over the second half of a season can change the shape of a promotion race. He’s already proved that once.
Table tight, schedule relentless
Despite the uneven start, the numbers offer a different perspective. Millwall sit only five points off the Championship’s extended six play-off places, with 24 regular-season games still to play. The margin for error is slim, but the margin for opportunity is huge.
They travel to West Brom on Saturday, then face another nine games in the following nine weeks. This is the part of the season where form can flip in a fortnight.
“There's so many games in the Championship, there's always the next game. You don't dwell on things as much,” Coburn said. It’s not a throwaway line; it’s almost a job description for anyone trying to survive this division’s grind.
The forward expects the picture to look very different once the treatment room clears. “Everyone is progressing well, and we should have almost everyone back after the break, and then you'll really see the true Millwall and the results we saw last year.”
That’s the bet inside The Den: that this version of Millwall isn’t the finished product, just a patched-up one.
“You win on Saturday, and then after the break we've got three back to back games, win those and you can fly up the table,” Coburn pointed out. In a league where clusters of fixtures can define a season, that stretch already feels significant.
For now, the message is simple: no panic, no drama, no wild swings in emotion. “We know we just need to concentrate on ourselves, stay grounded, not get too high or too low and just look to the next game.”
If Coburn stays fit and Millwall finally get their key players back in harness, that next game might start to look a lot more like last season’s Millwall than this season’s table suggests.
