2 wins in 16 I think I read on their forum. One point off the drop as it stands, with QPR winning. Will be a huge three points for us if we can secure it.

Have we dropped the tip-tapping it around the back routine?

Would have been nice to keep a clean sheet, but you just knew Ennis would net against us. Their only shot on target so far. With that said, we've had three and they've all gone in so I suppose it's just two rubbish defences - we've just had the better attackers thus far. Can't be too critical as we are still 3-1 up.

Yeah, I think there's a difference between losing the dressing room (which I think is pretty rare and usually ends with the manager leaving really soon afterwards) and the players losing confidence in the manager's style of play. It doesn't mean he's lost the dressing room in the sense they don't want to play for him, just that they start losing faith in the methods which has a direct impact on confidence and performance during matches.

High press can work well, but typically only for certain periods. Asking a team to high press for entire matches and in every match is going to lead to exhaustion fairly quickly even in the best conditioned teams. I believe it's part of the reason Klopp's teams tend to go strong for a season or two and then start to fade away. Even with elite athletes at elite levels of fitness it's difficult to sustain that indefinitely. Basically you need a plan around what your team is doing when not executing the high press, and I'm not sure we ever had a good plan for that.

Amidst the gloom of the past decade, that FA Cup match against Leicester will be one I'll always be fond of. We were electric for those first 70 minutes and looked like we belonged in the PL. If JDT takes the Sweden national job it's an odd one for me, as I'd have expected him to stay in club management, but I wish him well wherever he goes. For the first time in a very long time it felt like the manager was on our side, genuinely, and to me at least that means a lot. There were low points during his reign, of course, but I think with backing for the project he came in for he would have had us in a decent position.

Yeah, assistant seems to be the one position that can be added to. Mowbray brought Venus, JDT brought Remy Reijnierse and now Eustace has brought Gardiner with him.

Eustace is probably one of the best options when our criteria is out of work and won't want to bring in their own staff. Good luck to him - as others have said, he's going to need it. Honestly Glen, the meeting as a whole was unfair to all in attendence except one man.

We hired an inexperienced manager for a specific 'project' - his attributes at this point in his development as a coach seemed to match what we needed. The owners then change the project entirely, slash all promised budgets and the club becomes a chaotic mess. Inexperienced manager then struggles to stabilise the situation as things fall apart. Shocked Pikachu face. If you hire someone lacking experience to do a specific type of job, you can't be surprised when you change all the parameters and everything goes pear-shaped. JDT knew this wouldn't work for him and offered to resign. Our idiot owners refused to let him leave. As always they got it wrong.

I mean, if that's the best they could come up with they probably should have tried harder. It basically boils down to "we relied on the word of a person known to have messed things up in the past, and instead of double and triple checking everything was OK we ordered a curry to celebrate despite there still being two hours until the window shut. We were all in the building and none of us thought to double check anything. All one person's fault though."

It really is pathetic how glacially things move at Ewood - except outgoing transfers, oddly enough. Those seem to go through without a problem. We've probably been negotiating with Eustace since he left Birmingham but have only just got around to sorting the contracts out.

Imagine after all of this dragging the players in front of fan groups to try and spin that some scattered boos and Venky's/Waggott Out chants are the problem. Shameless.

Understand mate and I very much appreciate your candid explanation, as always. I just disagree with the "The fault of this lies solely with the secretary" line. The fault of the initial mistake, absolutely, but GB told us checks and balances were put in place to ensure this kind of thing never happened again - but clearly if this was done it was not done in a remotely satisfactory way. In my view the fault lies with everyone involved at senior management level, as they seem to have persisted with a lax and unacceptably casual attitude to checking everything is done correctly before celebrating their success.

Indeed so, after last January if I'm in Broughton's shoes I am not trusting anybody involved with last year's fiasco. I'd literally be checking every single detail myself to make sure nothing had gone wrong, as opposed to ordering celebratory curry, especially if the deal had been supposedly concluded at least 2 hours before the deadline. That is a lot of time to make absolutely and irrefutably sure that nothing had gone wrong. Whilst it's true that the mistake is ultimately made by one person, I'm gobsmacked that nobody in the building thought it wise to make absolutely sure everything was completed correctly.

Any idea who was feeding The Athletic the story that the transfer had been cancelled mid-flight, Glen, if indeed this was not the case? They're usually spot on with their stories, so it's surprising they'd say this without having a good source. Understand what you're saying in regards to one person making a mistake, but at the same time if I'm GB I am double-checking everything after last January and not taking anybody at their word.

JDT: I'll leave without compensation. Venky's: No JDT: OK, can we come to a mutual termination? Venky's: No

Just waiting for us to release Greg's clip from last year saying mistakes are made but it definitely won't happen again, with any mentions of "Lewis O'Brien" dubbed over with audio of Gregg saying "Duncan McGuire".

Would have been playing it whether he signed with us or them tbh.

#OnwardsAndUpWards #GetBehindTheLadsFFS

Got to feel for McGuire. Should have just signed for Wednesday instead of giving us a second chance. Still, I'm sure he'll be well up for signing a pre-contract for the summer 🙄

Mowbray never had to deal with the financial and recruitment insanity that JDT has had to put up with. JDT could only dream of having £7m to spend on a handful of players, let alone a single striker. JDT's biggest issue was an inability to adapt his tactics - but he's a rookie manager, you have to accept that he isn't going to be comfortable or confident enough at this point in his career to rapidly and decisively change direction when things aren't working. If he had been given the backing for the 'project' he had presumably been promised before joining, he would have likely been able to learn slowly by tweaking his preferred tactics as opposed to having to massively alter them due to the squad being repeatedly downgraded. He did make tweaks to his tactics here and there, obviously believing in himself and his methods, but too much damage had been done. You can't bring in an inexperienced manager, dump all of this garbage on them and expect everything to somehow work. It was inevitable that things would end this way. At a more stable club with stronger backing JDT will get his chance to grow and learn. Here he will have learnt some much needed lessons too - albeit mostly centred around how incompetence and neglect can torpedo any chance of success.

As Rev says, the 'reasonable notice' part would surely invalidate that clause, as I can't imagine such a hastily cobbled together meeting, that didn't even have an agenda, constitutes reasonable. I'm also not sure if supporters groups constitute sponsors or commercial partners in the context of the clause, either. Regardless, what would Waggott have been able to do if the players had said no? Tell them he was very disappointed in them? Oh well. I don't see how he could have the power to make them attend something like this, and honestly the lot of them should have said no way, that's a bad idea and we aren't interested. I am baffled as to why they didn't, particularly as they looked like they'd rather be anywhere else.

Maybe we gave Dunc that role as he won't be able to actually play for us.

I'm curious as to why the players didn't refuse in the first place. It's surely not a contractual obligation for them to be forced to talk to supporters in a random meeting with no agenda. Just points to there being no proper leader in the dressing room who would stand up to Waggott and say 'no mate, that's a fucking stupid idea, we aren't doing that'.

Which I believe was the Millwall match last season where the pressure was effectively off as at that point we only had a slim chance of getting into the playoffs. The same thing we saw under Mowbray - comfortable as underdogs, uncomfortable when there are any expectations.