Mattyblue

Just saw a tweet that says with 3 games to go, no club is mathematically guaranteed to be in the Championship next season. Without doubt the best competition in the country.

They often aren’t given as reds, but it was still a petulant challenge from a player that, for me, has a lot of growing up to do.

And Gillespie, Flitcroft, Berkovic, Short, Hignett, Bjornebye, McAteer, Damien Johnson. Some squad that for the second tier, and no wonder the core of it won cups and qualified for Europe in future seasons.

Oh much bigger than mere grammar and punctuation, who missed the sitter again?

Two mistakes in a tiny match report. In the esteemed Sunday Times, no less.Remarkable. Can you spot them?

A win yesterday and we’d have been right in there. Midweek. We play Millwall, Derby play Cardiff, PNE go to Brentford, Swansea go to Forest. Alas, most likely we’l be watching the playoffs with noses against the window...

Can we have a filter that prevents posts saying ‘people on here want Rovers to lose’? Complete lazy nonsense from folk who can’t debate, ‘err well you love us losing’ , it’s playground stuff that always just derails threads. Oh and as for a ‘dying’ site. Poor stuff S8, the likes of Herbie have worked hard transforming this place with the podcasts, player archives, nostalgia threads. Perhaps you missed it on one of your regular hiatuses (yet you keep coming back, so not all bad, obviously)...

No real surprise then that we’ve largely bumped along at this level for nearly a decade...

Have we ever spent more than a few hundred thousand on a defender or keeper under this regime? Our first choice defensive unit this season was: Walton/Nyambe/Cunningham/Lenihan/Toisin. Not a single transfer fee. That goes up to £300k with Bell in for Cunningham. Quite startling when we splurge £12 million on two very raw forwards.

They will, but with a state of the art training ground, a Cat 1 Academy and are generally a well run football club that doesn’t take risks, so primed not to fall away too far. So what? You might say, many clubs like that, but just remember they were a club in serious strife with a complete ramshackle structure when they stumbled across Dyche. And it was a lucky choice as he’d not particularly pulled up any trees elsewhere.

As you say highly unlikely, but Cardiff lose at Fulham tonight and it least sets it up a bit...

Ground tours need to make a diversion to Birdy’s house, has to be seen to be believed that place (sure he’d take his cut too ).

Makes a change

Yes the 31,000 (with potential for more) seems a complete white elephant now, but it was built on the proviso that we would spend the 90s growing and remember Blackburn itself was demographically different with a massive support within the town boundaries that doesn’t really exist now in large parts of it. By 1996 time you could see it bearing fruit with coaches coming from all over and clubs like Burnley/Bolton/Preston/Blackpool floundering in L1/L2, Accy in the Northern Premier. Even clubs like Man City were weak. Which would have meant even with the town itself changing, we would be covered long term by a branch network all over the north west. Alas, that calamitous relegation in 1999 (yes we came back in 2001 but much weaker, as the game was rapidly changing, growth of the southern clubs, Abramovich and so on), Jack’s death and the relative renaissance of other local clubs meant, we threw away a once in a life time chance to be the go to club outside Manchester and Liverpool. Yet, even up to 2011 we were averaging 25,000 crowds due to switched on executives who did everything they could to protect PL status and understood our demographics and priced games accordingly. Alas, this lost decade, 10,000 fans long out of the habit, a conveyor belt of carpetbagging executives who seemingly know little of how our fanbase is made up, neglectful owners, plus rapid demographic change, notwithstanding the as yet unknown pandemic impact, tells me we never even get back to 2011, never mind those halcyon days of the 90s

Doesn’t impact FFP as it’s infrastructure, and as they never refuse a cheque, I’d expect spades in the ground anytime now...