"They have to get used to the way we play" Yes I quite agree Tony, you can't expect someone to come and immediately be a spineless shitmuncher who can't pass forwards. It also takes time to learn to play in a completely different position than you have played for your whole career. Just shut up Tony you dinosaur you're embarrassing yourself.

Not sure if this has been mentioned ,but his quote about "not being able to find a cheap Bradley Dack" is absurd. Does he not remember how much Dack cost? Dack himself was a cheap Bradley Dack! Then the comments about Brentford like they are doing something magical. The recruitment is on him!!!

I think the Championship is as weak now as it has been for a while. Any team with an ounce of organisation and a solid game plan could challenge top 6. Including Warnock's style.

Wow - harsh question 2. Can you blame any player for their performances under Kean? Any player who left was a mercenary, and any player who stayed was... an unwanted mercenary. Was he ever really a “superstar”? He was great for us for a while but we he have been great elsewhere once he broke the Ewood spell. In any case, he was a top flight player for 9 years at Rovers, who contributed fantastically including some of our most memorable goals/moments, so deserves a bit more respect. Such a shame he will be most remembered for ‘that header’.

Hubris then punishment! My kids still laugh at me for over- celebrating Friedel's equaliser at Chartlton . I'm not sure how to say this, but this bloke grabbed me and we danced all the way down the aisle with a few others. It was only after we gathered ourselves together that I realised he had some form of learning difficulty and that he had a carer, who seemed a bit..well worried!

I wish Mowbray would piss off with the new players need to bide their time and get used to the way we play. What way is that....fucking shit? Hes used that excuse over and over to justify playing his dressing room favourites over better players.

Absolutely. After 3 years at the club, he can have no excuses. Other than Dack, I think Mowbay's player trading has generally been appalling.

A classic Mowbray gem. Anyone have any clue as to how we play?

He literally got Cardiff to the PL two seasons ago....

To be fair, I’ve come a cropper myself at the self-scan area numerous times....

We've reached the point where I can't tell fake quotes from real ones.

They need time to forget structure and all positional sense.

Plus he hasn't played for Middlesbrough, West Brom or Coventry and I'm sure he was pictured in ripped jeans. ☺️

Ridiculous. Pedersen always give his all for this club, he's well down the list of "milkers". He gave Rovers fans some great memories in his time and deserves the affection he gets.

Presuming he couldn’t bag his shopping?

To be fair though, they’re just reacting to what he said, why is that an over reaction all of a sudden? You wanted him out yourself, not even that long ago, to be fair....

For me, this only gives evidence to the lie. If it was really the case that new players have to get up to speed with our system etc and this takes time, he wouldn't throw some players straight into the team. It tells me it is face-saving bollocks, for when he doesn't want to play someone for one of various other reasons (like one of his besties playing there, or because he has over-stocked the position, or was only buying the player as a squad filler, etc).

So not exactly straight into the team as you said.

This is what winds me up about the Rovers backroom set up. Nyambe is a good wing back, he just needs to work on his final delivery and this is something that can be improved with repetition training. I noticed this about 3 seasons ago, so I'm unsure what the feck our coaches are doing on a day to day basis....most players are going backwards or just flat-lining. Bennett should be nowhere near the right back position and Ryan should have 200 appearances by now.

MGP is the only player I’ve seen take a corner to himself and get away with it and set up a goal

We laugh, but the amount of truth in these jokes is sobering.

Not even a sniff of any rumours today. Mind you they must be running out of players to link that Chaddy hasn't already recommended in 2015 ?

Didn’t take Cunningham any time to work out how to play left back. I mean has Gallagher really got up to speed with our system, yet he plays every week?

Dack does the same thing, much like Graham he's got the intelligence to compensate for his lack of speed and bulk. I think it's part of the reason they were able to link up so well, and it isn't the same with Gallagher or Brereton.

So he’s captain on Saturday then....

I think it's even more of an 'oven ready' excuse for this window as I suspect our transfer kitty is empty. After 31 Jan., I think we will hear again the likes of 'we did have resources' for the right player(s)' ! Sadly, I think a good many Rovers' fans take in what, IMO, is just bullsh1t.

What the hell is all this get used to the way we play guff again. If you have a style of play you find players to fit that surely ? If you change weekly in fact daily quite often then it doesn't really matter there's just no point signing square pegs for square holes. Sick to the back teeth of reading his backside covering jibberish now all designed to keep the idiots who fund us off his back. I absolutely pray for a new approach come summer.

For sake of argument, thought I'd check out a couple recent estimates of the aging curves for forwards and wingers. Plenty more estimates out there, but to quote a couple: https://statsbomb.com/2016/07/player-aging-attacking-players/ - Main conclusion (obviously generalised from the median number, so you can't blindly apply to everyone...): wingers peak at 26, forwards at 27-28 - Shot, key pass, and 'scoring contribution' rates remain fairly steady from the early 20s through to the late 20s, but they start to drop a bit from 28+ for forwards, while they drop fairly steadily for wingers from 26+ - However, the curves for dribbles, fouls suffered, and crosses all drop pretty steadily from the early 20s onward for both positions, suggesting aging players learn to still generate chances from know how over raw athleticism. So it may depend on the 'type' of striker/forward. - Key caveat is from what I can tell this is filtered on players who played a minimum amount, so there will be some 'survivor' bias as the worse older players drop out, but you can maybe assume that the rate of aging-related decline for top players is similar to that of the mediocre, and this may only be more of a problem when looking at players in their 30s+, where the true athletic freaks start to stand out. https://www.espn.co.uk/football/blog/tactics-and-analysis/67/post/3056495/soccer-age-curves-show-goalkeepers-and-central-defenders-peak-latest - The charts annoyingly seem to be missing, but going by the text of the article, the analysis gets around the 'missing old players' problem by first looking at minutes played (wingers peak at 23, the text doesn't mention strikers on this measure...) - Looking at a time series of individual players over time (seems like the obvious way to measure this to me given the data's freely available, so I'd say this finding trumps the rest!): strikers' shot rates decline steadily over time, but they make up for that by taking higher quality shots, peaking around 26-27, and then declining from about 29 onwards. - The study ranks positions from most to least 'age-sensitive': wide attacking midfielder, central attacking midfielder, full-back, central midfielder, striker, center-back, goalkeeper (generally fairly intuitive, I would think) Interestingly, this recent study, as part of showing the average age of Champions League teams has gradually been rising, shows that the average age of forwards has shown the steadiest/strongest increase: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6360147/, but that may just be a comment on how truly elite strikers have been developing rather than strikers in general (the above studies are looking at PL strikers, so perhaps the numbers do not generalise to lower leagues)

“Nyambe coming back could give us the option of moving Bennett further forward and moving the midfield around a bit." Or just dont play him at all because he isnt good enough!

Maybe the real Player of the Year is the friends we made along the way?

Downing, by a mile. Nyambe is the only other player with a chance of being in the conversation if he plays regularly for the remainder of the season. If he’d have got any sort of look in for the first quarter of games instead of inexplicably playing second fiddle to Bennett it would be between him and Downing.

Weren't there some absolute horror shows at the start of our league one campaign when we tried to play three at the back?

This is a guy who scored a fabulous last minute winner against the Dingles, and - arguably even better - scored twice at Old Trafford to beat a top, top Man United team. MGP is a very long way down the list of players who have 'milked' BRFC, not to mention 'going through the motions'. I'd love to think that this post is a joke. If it isn't you've just showed yourself up mate, big time.

This week's "Accrington Observer" column...with a few added extras... Lack of Dack Sets Rovers Back They say you don’t choose your football team, rather it chooses you by dint of circumstances. Call it fate or luck if you will. Just imagine the alternative. A sort of due-diligence process, whereby you scored your potential team on various characteristics and arrived at a “suitability ranking”. Many modern-day supporters happened at their favourites by simply looking at the league table or if more cosmopolitan, the Champions League winners’ roster. Had I been able to decide on the criteria to be used in such a scorecard, the prospects of my potential club to reach the FA Cup final would have been one of the key factors. I loved the FA Cup. (My choice of tense there is a conscious decision). I am of a generation that remembers FA Cup final day as being one of those rare occasions when you could watch a live game on TV (not even the League Cup final was broadcast live back then). The week after, you then had England v Scotland live in the Home Internationals, truly saturation coverage. I loved the whole FA Cup final day; much like an over-indulgent wedding, paid for by a proud father of an only daughter; no expense spared, nothing too good for his pride and joy. All that pomp, circumstance and sense of occasion rolled into an easy to consume televisual feast. The build-up, long before the days of reality TV let’s not forget, had cameras at the team hotels, on the coaches, circling helicopters following their route, pre-game interviews on the pitch; I couldn't get enough of this heady mix. Add an FA Cup final edition of “It’s A Knockout” and “Question of Sport” to the mix and that was your day pretty much sorted. I was insanely jealous of fans of lower level teams who reached Wembley – Sunderland, Fulham, Southampton, West Ham and QPR all had their moment of glory. Two semi-finals being the best we could muster; Cardiff and Old Trafford each great days out, but victory eluding us on each occasion. Morten, oh Morten, I still cannot believe you missed THAT header... We should really have won it during the Dalglish years. Victory in 1993 or 1994 would have made the perfect appetiser to the entrée of 1995’s league triumph. That Boxing Day knee injury to Alan Shearer possibly the significant contributory factor. Despite Steve Livingstone’s best efforts, the 1993 quarter final against Sheffield Utd will be remembered for a heart-breaking penalty kick defeat. Anyhow, enough whimsy, coming back to modern times – we now enjoy kick-off times all over the shop, half-empty, no three-quarters empty stadiums, VAR in some but not all games, replays in some rounds but not all, weakened teams being selected by clubs all over the country, TV coverage largely behind paywalls...what on earth has happened to this famous old competition? How did we, the supporters, ever allow it? Let’s be honest, the FA Cup is finished isn’t it? Well it most certainly is for Blackburn Rovers, for this season, before even the 3pm Saturday games kicked off. Saturday’s lunchtime encounter with Birmingham City was entirely in keeping with the current malaise surrounding the team. A number of chances created, falling to misfiring strikers, contriving on one spectacular occasion to block a goal bound shot of their own, with the Birmingham keeper and defence AWOL. Scant consolation is that Danny Baker no longer produces his famous "Own Goals and Gaffes" videos, for this particular clip would have been a shoo-in. Since that excellent win at Bristol City, the high point of an unbeaten run which raised hopes of January fuelling a promotion push, the talk has instead moved to noting that it’s now five games without a win in all competitions. Rovers seem to have discovered and mined a rich seam of inconsistency over the last 12 months or so with an efficiency that would have put the most productive members of the NUM to shame. This latest sequence though has caused more than a little concern, coming as it does after the serious injury recently sustained by Bradley Dack. There were plenty of unsubstantiated rumours doing the rounds that the current transfer window would see Rovers cashing in on their prime asset, a potential sale to West Bromwich Albion being the most vaunted destination. The recent publication of Venky’s London Ltd accounts (Rovers’ parent company) indicate that losses continue to grow despite promotion. If sufficient income can neither be generated on matchdays, nor via commercial activities, then logically, player sales is the only way to go. Of the current squad, Dack is very much the crown jewel, his injury may well have upset his fellow players, supporters and finance director equally, but for fundamentally different reasons. On the field, the Forest league game and Birmingham cup game highlighted that without Dack, Mowbray remains unsure which formation is the best alternative. Quite often, playing several different ones within the ninety minutes. Versatility is a much-prized asset but players like Stewart Downing have played at least four positions, Gallagher and Brereton continue to be used in wide positions and Armstrong has played wide left, right and centrally, often in the same game. The search for a “Dack-less formation” goes on, but this constant tinkering has been occurring for over a year; the inconsistencies in form likewise. The expectations of supporters for the window are now being managed by Mowbray with talk of there being “no treasure chest”. At best it seems, a loan or two, perhaps not even that. The “need to sell first” chat is gathering momentum, but with Dack injured, who else could raise the necessary finance? More to the point, cash in the bank doesn't score goals nor make saves or tackles, so it would have to be spent wisely – and how confident would any fan be in that regard currently? Sadly, the two substantial fees spent by Rovers in the last year have resulted in under-achievement and deep disappointment. Sam Gallagher and the increasingly forlorn Ben Brereton, seem unable to live up to the promise ignited by the size of their fees. Of course, the fees aren’t set by the players but they seem to be having a similar effect on them as a sizeable fee once did on Kevin Davies. The impact on Brereton especially is heart-wrenching. Many Rovers fans will have read Matt Jansen's excellent book over the Christmas holidays and will have learned of the fragile nature of confidence and how difficult it is, once lost, to restore in an elite athlete. At this point, one has to wonder whether Rovers should engage the services of a sports psychologist like Prof Steve Peters to work with Ben to rebuild his confidence. If you spent £7m on a supercar, you would in all likelihood ensure it was regularly serviced and maintained. Rovers cannot afford to write this fee off, they surely must consider all options to recover this situation and help the player. Ultimately as we know, Davies had to leave, start again and reinvent himself (very successfully) at a local rival under the tutelage of a manager once described by David Dunn the best man manager he ever played for, yes, Sam Allardyce of course. Right now, given the pressure that is starting to build and the recent caustic press comments of the manager, the chances of Brereton, Gallagher and Mowbray all being at Ewood in January 2021 seem slim. Curiously though, at that point, by dint of circumstances, we will almost certainly still have Bradley Dack.

How does Chaddy currently feel about Mowbray? Let's check:

You just haven’t got used to how we play yet. You need to “get real” and “give it a right good go” to “see what he is trying to do here”. Or if all else fails take a lead out of this fella’s book... https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/sport/14997890.owen-coyle-smart-turn-draws-wins/

I would be lining up like this.

It's groundhog day. Bowyer and Mowbray. Two managers with nice guy personas, company men. Have a knack of pulling a result out of the bag when pressure's mounting. Put together a winning run only to deflate all expectations. Top six nosebleeds. Shoehorn their pets into the side (Lowe, Bennett)

Which is replicated in home areas (and more in the case of the Jack Walker) ’Cheap as chips is Ewood’.

They are big, but they both seem like, as my dad would say, mard arses

It depends doesn't it. I would say 26 for strikers, 28 for centre halves and 30 plus for keepers. Wingers then would be even younger. Although I have forgotten what one of them looks like.

I'm sure their sales are going fine. Home fans on the other hand.... This is probably Waggot trying to cash in by letting them sit in the home end. Class A moron he is.

Probably a few misty-eyes when it comes to the quality of MGP's set-pieces. With the amount of corners, free-kicks, and long-throws that he took (esp under Allardyce) it was simple law of averages that he'd set-up a few. Very much a MOTD player, imo. Obviously a cut above some of the dross we have now but that's neither here nor there.

Well I for one am quite excited about the Jones link. If it's a loan with a view to purchase that is. We don't have a proper winger other than Chapman. Downing doesn't have the legs to beat a man and whip a ball in, but does have fantastic ability to cross from deep. Rothwell cuts inside and very rarely has an end product and Armstrong has pace to burn but again the final ball is lacking. So if we can bring Jones in and he can start supplying the strikers with better crosses then maybe they might score more.

Very optimistic. I am not even convinced that we could shift them if we didnt ask for a free, as Gallagher will be right up there with our highest earners, not befitting for the striker with the worst strike rate in the League. And Brereton might not be on as much but he wont be on peanuts and the sides who would want him wouldnt be able to match it. They were bought as profitable assets but are actually liabilities.

Player of the year: Downing Players player of the Year: Downing Supporters Player of the Year: Downing Disabled Supporters player of the Year: Downing Newcomer of the Year: Downing Fittest player of the year: Downing Most Intelligent player of the year: Downing Stonesrick player of the year: ? Not quite made my mind up yet ?

You don't have to. Just accept that you opinions will not go unchallenged.

Doesn’t stop Stanley putting some effort in for 2k...