Hasta

Pears will get a buyer somehow. Bucko will be given away.

Travis and Tronstadt looked today like they had no intention of competing for anything close to a 50/50, which to be fair doesn’t bother me in the last pre-season game before we start proper. However for their third goal Travis just looks like he can’t be arsed sprinting, is so slow to get across and just lunges to bring him down and misses.

And yet Barry Bannan signs a new contract this afternoon 🤷‍♂️

How else are we going to hit Gestede’s target of 3000 academy minutes this season.

You post this like you’re proving or showing how strong our squad is, but to most of us it just looks weak. Saying players who “suit Ismael’s style of play” means nothing. Telalovic might have suited JDT’s style of play more than Keifer Moore, but if they aren’t very good it doesn’t matter. And if our style of play is “closing down and pressing” you need to make sure they still have ability and aren’t just headless chickens. No good getting the ball and wasting good opportunities and positions like today.

Have I gone to bed and woke up and suddenly every thinks Gueye is Zlatan ! I wouldn’t sell him due to the lack of options and he’s a handy plan B, but talk of £4mill to £6million is bonkers. Ismael didn’t fancy him at all at the end of last season, and he didn’t start a game after mid-March.

1. Winners of the Championship Ipswich 2. Automatic promotion (runners-up) in the Championship Coventry 3. Four Play off semi-finalists in the Championship Leicester, Sheff U, Boro, Southampton 4. Three relegated sides from the Championship Wednesday, Hull, Charlton 5. Where will Rovers finish in the Championship? 16th 6. First Championship club to change manager (after the season starts) Swansea 7. Winners of the Premier League Liverpool 8. A notable wild card prediction of something that will happen in the Rovers universe during the season (e.g. Donald Trump visits Ewood Park) The stands or the whole ground become sponsored. The Venkys Xpress Stadium. The Number 39 Kebab and Pizza Blackburn End. The Vape-orama Nuttall Street Grandstand.

I stand corrected. He seemed quite safe when he first started playing for us but was one he really seemed to get forward when JDT-ball was working. For some reason I thought he arrived a year earlier.

Mowbray bought a raw Brittain. JDT got him playing one-two’s, first time passes, running off the ball and getting into the box. Eustace got him defending better. Its a good example of a player absorbing the best bits from each coach he’s worked under.

Bizarre competition. You'll be telling me next we don't get than much-desired trip to Wembley if we got to the final.

And Burnley. Probably scheduled for 8am on a Monday behind closed doors.

I may be wrong, but I really don’t see the owners being interested in the slightest in watching the highlights of a pre-season friendly in Spain.

Balaji and Co. are currently on the phone to Suhail asking why we could have sold our women’s team to Everton’s parents company.

As Stanley are really struggling, you'd think the very best players from their academy would have moved into the first team squad when they shut the academy. They regularly feature 18 year olds each season to some degree.

As far as I can tell, Sheff Weds hasnt actually moved. Just been selected for TV over Christmas. Preston away will be annyong for many, although we will probaly "make an afternoon of it"

He was hardly injured last season and was in the team or on the bench for Plymouth most of the time so no reason why he wouldn't be fit. The run up to him signing for Rovers is listed below. The longest spell he had last season without making any first team appearances was the 4 game run in March / April whilst he was at Ewood. He was hardly like Dennis who hadn't kicked a ball in a first team for almost a year. Nor had he missed loads of training through injury last season. Therefore I'm not sure how you can say he wasn't fit. He appeared better as the season went on because he wasn't starting. He was generally coming on when we were shutting up shop and had less ground to cover.

If he’d been available and played most of the season for Plymouth, why was he unfit when he came?

The GK is the same then surely? Other than that, I don't disagree much. If we don't lose anyone we will be in a reasonably decent shape for the start of the season. You explanation for AM and CF being stronger is a bit of a stretch.

Are you talking the squad on the 1/9/24 compared to today ? Or the squad on the 28/7/24 compared to 28/7/25 ?

What hope. We all expected a load of underwhelming foreign cheapies that nobody wanted. That’s predominantly what we’ve got. I still expect 2 of the 3 contract expires to depart.

Comfortable in the end but we did seem to get the rub of the green a little bit in the middle part when the game was still in the balance. You could see against a better side that we may have some limitations if we come up against top class opposition. I was screaming “Robinho” at the screen at one point but he only scored 14 goals for City. It must be difficult on the spot, as I’m just watching on the sofa and I’m racking my brain for answers like Kieran Gibbs but missing the obvious like Gazza, Gerrard and Jimmy Greaves.

Good question. I had a look at his Rovers goals to find any other left footed ones that weren’t tap ins. The only one i found from the video below is 9- Wimbledon away (40 seconds into video). Maybe goal number 31 (3mins42) shows why he didn’t use his left as much?

The issue I have is last summer ‘worked’ because we brought in proven experience with Batth, Weimann and Cantwell on potentially higher salaries. Ribeiro was also proven at this level. It was a change in the recruitment philosophy and it worked. So far this year we have 1 ‘proven’ champ player and 3 unproven I suspect on cheaper salaries. Plus if we were forward thinking, we would know which of Travis, Tronstadt and Brittain were likely to leave and would be looking at suitable quality replacements now. That’s how you progress. Trying to replace like for like when they leave is just bad planning.

My favourite Shearer goal was the winner in injury time against Leeds in 1994 that nearly started a riot in the Darwen End with their fans. They deserved the pain of that one after they had sang through the Busby minutes silence. Not the most important (although it was at the time) but so satisfying.

Wade can be deceptive. Last night was Clayton’s highest average in a game at this tournament, but it did feel like he wasn’t playing as well as he had done previous. Historically Wade has always been one of the biggest 140 hitters on tour and one of the best double hitters. He is averaging a ton across the whole tournament. He’s back up to 5th in the world having dropped out of the top 20 a few years back. In this competition, in the four games he has played he has hit more 140s than his opponent in every one. His checkout percentages have been 56%, 42%, 65%, 67%. That’s ridiculously high and as you say is how he nicks the legs. For comparison, Littler has been 35%, 43%, 32%, 53%. Wade just doesn’t hit a barrage of 180s. However if Littler turn up on his A or even B game he’ll still cruise this.