den

The damning statistic for me Matty is the 11 defeats. Good teams simply don’t lose that many games before the new year.

3rd in the league in December means nothing. You have to look at the full picture unless you’re happy to kid yourself.

Not rovers related, but still nostalgia. Probably the greatest Brazilian of all time.

Who did you think we’d replace him with - Alex Ferguson?

Bottom line to all this is the squad just isn’t of the standard required. Until that changes things can only deteriorate I.M.O.

Yes, possibly. Two points on that… 1) we caught them by surprise with our approach. They just didn’t know how to combat it 2) They looked a poor side, but England might just have made them look poor. The key is how quickly England scored their runs. It gave them long enough to take 20 wickets in all three tests.

McCullum and Stokes instilling an approach to test cricket that I don’t think has been seen before. They aren’t interested in drawing any game, it’s either win or lose - and players individually failing is completely tolerated. There’s no criticism of them whatsoever. So there is only one approach which is to try to win the game whatever the situation and by all accounts the players to a man have bought into it and are benefitting immensely from it. I think we’re in for an amazing era. Let’s see where we go. One things for certain, if this current success continues every other test side will have to follow.

Maybe going to be a bit unpopular here after a good away win. I’ll back @J*B here, Norwich we’re abysmal. If you want opponents to face when things aren’t going great, then games against opponents like todays are a great help. Rovers worked their socks off to a man, from the KO. Absolutely the opposite from their performance against North End. Defensively we coped fairly well but Norwich just didn’t test us like I’m sure they could have done. Nobody let themselves down today for sure but I just thought our quality on the ball wasn’t anywhere near good enough, or anywhere near as good as it should be. However, after the latest results/performances we’ll all settle for the result. As I said, built on pure graft but you can’t get away with just that every game.

They’re as bad as us

Take away the effort- which should be there anyway - I thought our quality on the ball was very poor.

The top gear lads didn’t find it too friendly.

Oops, changed it!

It’s brilliant to watch and the desire to play attractive, attacking test cricket is fantastic to see. England rightly see themselves as leaders in a new era, a new approach. If they are successful and blow teams away regularly other sides will have to follow. As in any professional sport though, It “IS” about results. Play this way and win and you’ll be number one in the world. Every side will fear you. Play this way and start losing regularly and nobody will fear you. You’ll become cannon fodder and derided. As for now, it’s superb. Ben Stokes currently looks like the best cricket captain in the world.

He excites me. He doesn’t look like a footballer though, does he! If I didn’t know him and he was leant on the bar in the queens- and somebody told me he was currently the best footballer in the world, I would never, never, ever believe you. Id have put him down as an Amazon warehouse worker.

What I’m seeing now is a little different to anything I’ve seen in all the years I’ve watched Rovers. We’ve had some really poor managers, really poor players and really poor teams. I’ve never seen any rovers side contribute so much to their own downfall as this lot do. Week after week, through trying to do things they obviously can’t do, they’re gifting the opposition goals and losing games - and they carry on doing it. Madness.

The recent transfer “policy” makes the signings of the likes of Endean, Fryatt, Mcnamee and Branagan some kind of golden era.

TBH building from the back is good, it’s how most international teams play now. JDT’s problem is that he doesn’t have the players to play that game. He can try week after week to get them to do it but doesn’t know what to do when it’s not working. He came into this with no experience of championship football and it shows. I don’t believe he’ll turn this around.

JDT won’t have a clue what to do now. That’s for certain.

I’ve seen quite a few relegations but I’m not sure I’ve seen anything this bad.

PNE are simply organised and we can’t deal with that. 😏 So much wrong here. Defenders go missing whenever we lose “possession “, no midfield at all - and as for strikers? What bloody strikers?

Never seen anything like this

No midfield

This is absolutely terrible

Korea have made a few chances against Brazil. If England play Brazil in the final we can beat them. As long as we can stop them being Brazil as well 🙂