Where is Paul Mani ? Not like him to miss a window.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/rafa-benitez-claims-blackburn-rovers-15636792 The Fat Scouser Waiter plastic Geordie having a bit of a nicker twist. Arrogant Diva.

Tom Cairney, words almost fail me. He doesn't even dive this time, he slowly sits down in stages in the penalty area and VAR awards a penalty. Thank God Fulham missed it and justice served. ok maybe there was the faintest of contact but never ever enough for a penalty. It's become a game for "x", ... A major problem with VAR is that humans are still involved on the decision making process. Well done Oldham on giving another over arrogant PL club a blackeye.

His legs are faster than his brain. Runs into trouble, shoots from impossible angles and forgets it's a team game. A frustrating player but if what he tries works he looks like a top player with a deadly finish, problem being it rarely works at Championship level. The above is re AA, with BB I am still coming to terms with his Quasimodo impressions when preparing for an aerial challenge for the ball or is it bells.

Pep wants to win this years FA Cup so we had better avoid Citeh in the draw, until the Final anyway. Plenty of suprise results already. All credit to Newport but Leicester were pants, never really got out of second gear. The players just seeemed to have no real desire to progress in the Cup. I love the FA Cup and delighted that TM is taking this years competition seriously. Luck in the draw can take any ambitious side a long way, but we have to get past the Toon first and I can't see their second eleven being so crap in the replay. Still, I do fancy us to progress, if we are up for it as much as we were at Cashley's Cash & Carry Warehouse

Well on video anyway.

Voldemort is quality, I wish we had similar. We already have our Harry 'Travis' Potter.

My feed was a bit jumpy but think I did see that one but discounted it as whistle was long blown. Shame about the pen, Evans had a good game otherwise. Travis is a gem. Hope the replay is picked for TV

All the time he was on, even if only about 15 minutes. Did he actually have a touch?

As an academic exercise and also because I don't like to be bettered by a shit Sammysung phone I did a copy, paste on a gmail page for space, edit, copy and paste transcript as follows. Quite easy really: "Even now, almost a half-century on, Tony Mowbray, can remember when he first fell in love with the FA Cup. It was watching the final, starting in 1970, when his father would draw the curtains at their house in Redcar, North Yorkshire, get the TV ready, and his mother would lay out the cold beef sandwiches. “Dad always seemed to win the meat draw at the social club — must have known the committee,” Mowbray says laughing. “He used to have all his mates round, 12 blokes sitting there. I could never get on the sofa, so I’d be laying in front of the telly, a telly you turned the dial to tune in. The FA Cup final was such a massive event in our house. 1970 is the first I remember: Leeds v Chelsea, long throw, [Dave] Webb coming in at the back stick [to settle the replay]. Then Liverpool v Arsenal 1971 . . .” And the following season, a fifth-round replay on February 29, 1972, a day that will never be forgotten by Mowbray, eight at the time. He was at school, when his father, Clive, a scaffolder at British Steel, burst into the classroom. “What’s my dad doing here? ‘Come and watch Georgie Best,’ he said. Manchester United were coming to Ayresome Park. The coal strike was on, no floodlights, so they had to play in the afternoon. My dad used to drip-feed me on George Best, and that’s what a footballer should be like. Unfortunately for me, I became a big rugged centre half, not George Best. “My dad was driven on football. Loved it. He was in the social clubs constantly with his mates, and I was the little lad left at the door, while he had a quick pint, then, ‘Get your scarf ready’. We’d walk through the streets, he’d pay to get in the Holgate End, I’d nick in front of him and we’d go through together. It was buttons to get into Ayresome Park. Now football all seems corporate. “The memory I have is of walking up the concrete steps in the Holgate End and seeing the oasis of green. It left a lasting effect on me of how sacred football was amongst all the working-class people in their grey and black coats, and the smell of Bovril. In the middle of the Holgate End, the crowd swayed as shots came in, feet off the ground. “At nine and ten, now and then dad would take me in the middle before the madness started. As I got older, I got closer to the middle, in with my mates, thinking this was what life was about, really. Ayresome Park is not there any more, it’s housing estates. Sometimes I find myself just driving down the road to go past where the stadium used to be.” As the third round of the FA Cup quickens today, Mowbray oversees his 100th game as Blackburn Rovers manager, heading to St James’ Park where he made his Middlesbrough debut in 1982, marking an England legend. “I remember the nervousness of playing against Kevin Keegan, thinking, ‘I hope he doesn’t embarrass me.’ I only had one fear, letting people down.” He did not. The game finished 1-1, and Keegan never got away from him. “Whenever I have a day off, I meet Gary Pallister in Yarm, and we talk about life and football. The driving factor of a lot of players like me and Pally was the fear of letting down the people you love, your family. I don’t want to be the one who costs us the goal, who loses his man in the box. It churns your stomach. “My mum was always critical of me. I have kids — nine, 11 and 14 — who all play football in their local Sunday teams, and I’m very mindful of trying not to be overcritical of them. I have a 14-year-old who is nearly as tall as I am, can run like the wind, wins the cross-country and 100m, and yet he hasn’t the hunger I have in my belly, burning away. ‘Why did you let that kid push you about?’ I tell him. ‘Get stuck in.’ He’s trying to figure out at 14 that he knows how much his dad loves him but why is he pushing me so hard? I want him to survive in life, let alone the next football match. But he’s on the PlayStation and this Fortnite game all the time.” So why not turn the wifi off? “Listen, it’s chaos then,” he replies. “I say, Go in the garden and play football’. I spent my whole life as a kid walking to school, and kicking a ball about. I’m really worried about the next generation of players, not Harry Kane and Dele Alli — they’re great players — but the next generation on their PlayStations.” Mowbray is tempted to show his eldest son a picture he keeps of what he was doing at 14, standing in the tunnel at Ayresome Park as Graeme Souness strides past. “The tache. The long hair. He looks like Magnum! The shorts in the 1970s were almost obscene [short] and he has these legs which were always shining. I see Souness now on TV, and you can feel in his analysis that if you haven’t got a bit of bite about you then you’re weak. He’s from an era where he played against Billy Bremner and Johnny Giles, and if you don’t look after yourself you were in trouble.” Mowbray could certainly look after himself as one of Middlesbrough’s most cherished players, blossoming under Bruce Rioch. “I’d had Jack Charlton and Malcolm Allison, managers with big reputations, yet Rioch made us think two or three steps in front,” he says. “He taught us a lot about positional play. He was an amazing manager for me with successive promotions from liquidation, not even administration, to the top flight.” A famous diving header in 1988, in a victory over Aston Villa, helped Middlesbrough on their climb to the old first division. “I had a daft blond flick with peroxide hair,” he says. “That picture has been in lots of magazines. People do send me pictures to get signed, and the lads pin them on the wall before I get to them. I have still got the bottle of champagne from that game, unopened, man of the match. I was a young boy from the town, being captain, being successful, does it get any better?” Mowbray went on to play for Celtic and Ipswich Town, and has managed 625 matches, impressing at Hibernian and West Bromwich Albion, but often doing jobs in difficult circumstances. “Have I ever gone into a calm club? At Celtic, I didn’t survive a year in a job that needed dramatic change, with an old team. Second is nothing at Celtic. If you’re losing, you get absolute pelters, and you are the bad guy in the story that is Scottish football. It’s the brutality of that job, the brutality of green or blue, win or lose, goodie or baddy, dealing with five or six national newspapers every day, that didn’t suit my conscientious side. “I went back home, went to Middlesbrough. For three years I toiled hard at that club. That was the most painful time. I had young children who went to Yarm School, all Boro fans, and they were getting, ‘Your dad’s just got sacked.’ It was a tough time for my family. “I took time out. I tried to be a dad for six months but football dragged me back. Joe Royle phoned me up and said, ‘What are you doing? Coventry City, are you joking?’ I said, ‘Joe, listen, I need to get back to work, a group of lads who I can mould, give my values to, my integrity. We had James Maddison, Adam Armstrong and Jacob Murphy. Joe Cole came. I left Coventry because they became a basket case [with the politics about the ownership and stadium].” Then the controversial Venky’s family offered him the Blackburn job. “Joe Royle phoned me up and said, ‘You are a glutton for punishment.’ Yet this is a proper football club.” As he walks along a corridor at the Brockhall Village training complex, Mowbray points out the pictures of the title-winning Chris Sutton and Alan Shearer, the huge badge in reception with 1875, and we stop and talk to his popular PA, Lesley Fielding, part of the human fabric of Blackburn Rovers. “It’s a proper club with proper people,” Mowbray says. “I met the owners, I think they are nice, humble, honest people. They talked about family, which appealed to the conscientious side of my nature. I have great aspirations to help the owners to try to put Rovers back to where they and the supporters feel it should be. The highs of being a manager are greater than being a player. “But unless you have your tactics, words of inspiration and selection right, and you get beat, nobody knows the depths you can fall to. I’m not nice to be around when we’ve lost. I have to go back to three boys waiting for me, and when the lights come up the drive they all come running to the door. They are consoling. You have to be a dad then and yet the wife [Amber] knows when she can start a conversation. Mowbray has managed seven clubs in a career in the dugout spanning 16 years. “I have to switch off because I have to take three kids to matches, and try to watch their games but I have yesterday’s game in my head. With modern technology, I can watch the whole game back on my phone. Football . . . I do it because I love it. I do it for my kids so they can go to a nice school, and get an education and have a life. I toil with, ‘Am I doing the right thing by my children? Am I spending enough time with them?’ Life’s a juggling act.” Perspective on his profession is not far away. On our walk through Brockhall, Mowbray encounters Mark Venus, his assistant manager, who chats away, not giving any hint of recent bereavement. “His wife died on the 18th of December of breast cancer,” Mowbray says later. “My wife [Bernadette, his first wife] died New Year’s Day 1995. Breast cancer. He [Venus] hadn’t been to work for two and a half months. He’s just come back. There’s perspective for me. Somebody I’ve known, and his wife, for 30-odd years. He’s just buried her. It’s horrific, really.” Mowbray cares for his staff, and such compassion was confirmed when he was psychologically profiled. “You answer 60 questions, and there are four elements of a profile: dominant, influential, steady or conscientious. I’m stuck on the line between dominant and conscientious. I’m a football manager. I have to be dominant for 60, 70 people — the whole building,” he says. Spending brief time with the leading managers in the land gave Mowbray further insight into the importance of emotional intelligence, being conscientious. “We played Liverpool pre-season, and Jürgen Klopp came in afterwards, and we talked for half an hour. Wow. I sat next to Pep Guardiola at a dinner. He has the ‘dominance’ factor, and yet he’s conscientious, caring too. Klopp and Guardiola are two of the world’s greatest managers and yet you could feel their humility. “I care about people here, make sure they get a card, a bottle of wine or chocolates on their birthday. If they’ve got a problem with their family, ‘Forget about the football go and look after your missus or kid’. I feel for players when I leave them out. I make sure I explain the logic. The only time I’m not conscientious is when they let me down. I shout at them. They have respect because they know I’m shouting at them to try to make their careers better.” Mowbray cares. HIS MANAGERIAL RECORD Ipswich 11 Oct – 28 Oct 2002 Played 4 Won 1 Draw 1 Lost 2 Win % 25 Hibernian May 2004 – Oct 2006 Played 108 Won 52 Drawn 16 Lost 40 Win % 48.1 West Brom Oct 2006 – June 2009 Played 140 Won 58 Draw 30 Lost 52 Win % 40.7 Celtic June 2009 – Mar 2010 Played 45 Won 23 Draw 9 Lost 13 Win % 51.1 Middlesbrough Oct 2010 – Oct 2013 Played 153 Won 61 Draw 37 Lost 55 Win % 39.9 Coventry Mar 2015 – Sep 2016 Played 75 Won 26 Draw 22 Lost 27 Win % 34.7 Blackburn Feb 2017 – present Played 99 Won 47 Draw 30 Lost 22 Win % 47.5 Team Honours Championship 2007-08 Individual honours Scottish Football Writers’ Association Manager of Year 2004-05 League Managers Association Manager of the Year 2007-08

Register for free with the Times and you can access 1, maybe it's 2 or 3, articles for free each week or maybe it's per month. Obviously I haven't read the small print but free it is. Anyway just read TM, great read, can't copy as on a crap phone and the article has too many photos etc to edit out.

Not on UK tv https://m.livesoccertv.com/match/3188679/newcastle-united-vs-blackburn-rovers/

There are plenty of Islands with friendly natives awaiting your discovery.

Live in most European countries including Malta https://m.livesoccertv.com/match/3188679/newcastle-united-vs-blackburn-rovers/

Surely it's good to keep Danny around so that Ben can learn the art of Striker from a proven expert to aid and potentially speed up his development. How many minutes did "last legs" manage in games he started over the busy festive period?

I admit the above made me chuckle and that I had hoped we had some secret last minute escape route from this deal but that's not the case. Now our signing for the new mantra "undisclosed" fee is a full on Rover so all the best of luck to Ben. Good for him is good for us. It's going to be interesting tracking his development. Somewhere on here I've said this is a play for profits. To big those up he has to play and he has to perform well.

Agree. He's a Rover, one of us.

Very pleased that Danny G has signed a year extension. Ben's signs for "undisclosed" fee..... maybe @Biz was right all along re fee for BB.

What is BTTS? I'm not a betting man myself but interested.

Mercer Mk2

Yes and one that many on here were happy to avoid. Has he improved, I genuinely have no idea.

A fair view, don't disagree. I hope TM's overall planning is based on life after Dack and I hope he's still with us come the end of this window.

So when we talk about giving a manager 2, 3 or 4 windows we actually mean 2, 3 or 4 summer windows? Mowbray is on record as saying you cannot build a successful Club using loans. However I do believe that astute use of the loan market, especially in the January window, can make a big diffetence say in finishing midtable or actually making a play off push. Mowbray said yesterday that Rovers, to hold on to Dack, have to show PL ambition which a midtable finish will not, imo, achieve. Mind you this was in an article basically bigging Dack up as PL oven ready now.

https://www.themag.co.uk/2019/01/blackburn-say-looking-forward-to-playing-in-front-of-more-than-50000-at-newcastle-they-might-be-disappointed-newcastle-united/

We are doing fine, see we beat West Brom.