Yes the players aren't great, and the mistake from Pears is almost laughable - there's keepers in Sunday pub leagues who would be embarrassed by that - but I disagree that a different manager wouldn't make a difference. Wednesday's players aren't particularly good either, but the difference between them and us on Sunday was they were well drilled - they had a set way of playing and they each knew their jobs and did them to the best of their ability. In comparison, our lads look like they've been sent out on to the pitch with no instructions whatsoever - players are coming short and looking for the ball to feet and seeing the ball kicked over their heads and then, when they do make runs in behind, the defenders are looking to play into the midfield - we look disjointed, the players aren't in the right positions to help their teammates, because no one seems to know what they are supposed to be doing or where they are supposed to be. It's abject and dire, and it's on the manager who either hasn't given them a game-plan, or hasn't been able to get it over to them

1 win in 13, happy with a point in winnable home games and now capitulating in such a pathetic way in what is a massive game for our season - does anyone still believe that this clown is good enough to be managing our club?

I don’t know if it’s been mentioned already, but did anyone else spot that Martin came out to greet the away fans before the game - followed by someone videoing it for their social media - and he chose the exact moment that MGP was introduced to the crowd to step onto the pitch, no doubt to make it sound like he was getting the rapturous reception that he believes he deserves I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone quite so narcissistic as Russell Martin

Middlesborough managed to miss an open goal from about 4 yards out in the first half and also hit the bar in the last minute - yes we kept a clean sheet, but were tiny margins away from a 2-0 defeat. Not sure I’d class that as nullifying them tbh

The guy has won one game in eleven attempts. And, yes, he’s managed to pick up a few draws along the way, but in truth in the majority of those games we were second best and probably fortunate to come away with a point - Plymouth, Preston, Norwich, Middlesborough and Millwall all probably came away wondering how they didn’t take 3 points from us. So it will take more than one win, no matter how good (and welcome) it was, to convince me that a guy who has shown next to no tactical nous thus far is ‘a decent manager who knows how to play the championship’ - even Henning Berg managed to claim a 4-1 away win during his short tenure!!

We absolutely don’t, but God bless your optimism!

Out of interest, if this is how the rest of the season pans out - us staying up but Eustace not winning a game in his time as a manager - would people see that as job done and be happy to keep him for next season, or would you want him out and start afresh with someone else?

Absolutely this - and I find it so infuriating that he squandered our best chances of getting wins by being so negative. Similarly, I fully believe we could have come away from Birmingham with 3 points had we played to the players strengths and passed the ball in the way that they were used to from the first half of the season, instead of him trying to force some kind of route one shite on a team that just didn’t have the players to do it. On a related note, given that we would pretty much all agree that Mowbray was very lucky to survive his regular runs of 9/10 games without a win, how long do we persevere with Eustace before we accept that we’ve dropped a bollock and cut our losses?

Agreed. How hard is it not to take your shirt off when you score? I don’t ever remember it being a thing when I was growing up - in fact, I would suggest that for the vast majority of football history players have managed just fine without whipping their shirt off after finding the net. If you can’t manage to find another way of celebrating, especially when you know what the punishment is in advance, then you deserve whatever comes your way - which in this case, I think, is missing the chance to play in a cup semi-final at Wembley

Well, thank God that wasn’t a must-win game, eh? Otherwise we’d really be in the shit. But this manager knows better, we don’t need to actually win games, we’ll just try and grind out a few more draws and pray that there’s a couple of teams worse than us. What could possibly go wrong?!? I didn’t see the match today (thank God) and so I might be completely wrong, but reading on here and twitter it seems like we set up all wrong yet again and were second best at home to a fellow struggler. Which, if so, should be the final straw as far as this manager is concerned. He wasted the games against Birmingham and Cardiff by trying to play too direct and, despite 5 years of evidence, believing that Sam Gallagher could turn into Kevin Davies (Bolton edition) overnight. And now he’s wasted the games against Millwall and Plymouth by persisting with 5 at the back and nullifying our own attack. Honestly, I’d fire him tonight and let Damien Johnson have this week, plus the international break, to try and get us firing. I know it won’t happen, but I can dream! At least with McFadz suspended he might finally ditch the 5 at the back next week - although I suspect I’m going to end up disappointed on that score too

Not saying he’s wrong, but, according to the club’s official twitter, Pears missed out with illness rather than injury, so surely it’s too soon to know whether he will be back or not (unless it’s something much more serious than a fever/vomiting bug)

I think it’s all been said already, but teams below us winning means draws won’t do, so to send out a team with such a negative formation at home against a relegation rival and to not even try and win the game is nothing short of criminal. We were playing a team who anyone could have told you before the game would sit deep and be delighted to go away with a point, so to play 3 CBs, plus 3 forwards who just got lost against their defence, and only 2 in midfield, meant we had no runners from deep and nothing to cause them any problems, and we’re relying on our CBs to provide any creativity - which, given the 3 of them struggle to kick a ball in a straight line most of the time, is probably not the greatest game plan in the world The saddest thing of all though is that I just don’t think I care anymore. The fight’s been ripped out of me and all I could think of as I left tonight was ‘thank God I’m away this weekend so I don’t have to sit through another 90 minutes of this’. There was a time when I do everything in my power not to miss a game, now I’m just glad of an excuse not to go.

There were a number of poor performances across the park today, but I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a worse individual performance than Gallagher today. Not only did he contribute nothing positive, as you rightly say he actually stopped a number of attacks for us. I never want any of our players to pick up injuries, but when he went down in the second half I was praying it would be serious enough to force him off for the rest of the game

Speaking to a couple of geordies after the game, they were saying that there was an issue with the way the barcodes were printed on the tickets and so the turnstiles weren’t reading them - that was the cause of the delay, apparently 🤷‍♂️

I’ve been as critical as anyone of Eustace and the style of football we’ve played under him up until now, but last night showed that hopefully he will look to evolve the style, as the players showed (again) that not only are they more than capable of playing decent, progressive football, but they also look much more comfortable doing so than the more agricultural style of late. We went toe to toe with a very good Premier League team and, for the vast majority of that game (the 10 mins either side of ht aside) we did so without resorting to aimless punts and still looked solid defensively and also looked dangerous going forward too. But it’s also frustrating, because if they had been sent out to play like that in the games at Brum and Cardiff then I’m certain we’d now have at least 3 points more, maybe 5. Let’s hope he’s learned ahead of 3 massive games next week. Incidentally, I thought we looked a lot more fluent and balanced after McFadzean had gone off and we went to essentially a 4-4-2. I’d like to see us start games like this, especially at home, and keep the option of bringing McFadz off the bench to shore things up late on in games after we’re (hopefully) ahead.

He really isn’t

If we keep playing in this manner he’d have to pay me £250 to get a season ticket - and even then I’d think twice!!

On the plus side we actually tried to pass the ball to one another tonight instead of just smashing it downfield all game. The downside however was that we did it with so little pace or tempo and with no one making forward runs at all and so we very rarely got past the centre circle. I know that the last couple of months under JDT it all seemed to go tits up, but the second half of last season and the start of this one I genuinely felt like we were building something and moving in the right direction. In the space of two weeks this new manager has sapped all of the hope and enthusiasm for Rovers out of me. I hope I’m proved wrong and that, in time, he can imprint his style on this team and get us playing some good stuff, but I fear that this might be all that there is and that this actually is his ‘style’. Oh, and one last word on tonight’s game. As good as a defender as McFadzean is, he isn’t half shit on the ball. Couple that with Scott Wharton next to him, who must be one of the most limited players we’ve ever had, and it’s like playing with 9 whenever we’re in possession

The problem is we’re playing so deep, partly due to McFadzean being slow asf and partly due to us trying to be ‘pragmatic’ and ’hard to beat’, and then, when we do occasionally touch the ball, we just smash it 60/70 yards forward over the heads of our forwards, so we become incredibly stretched between the 5 at the back and the 3 up front, meaning that the 2 in the middle are having to try and cover 50+ yards of the pitch and it’s an impossible task. Even Tronstad hasn’t looked half as good under the new manager and his shit tactics. In today’s game, as soon as PNE worked out that that was where the space was and started playing into the midfield instead of going long, there was only one team in it and they just came at us at will, as we just kicked it back to Lindsay back deep for them at every opportunity. Thankfully they started half asleep and gifted us a couple of easy goals, otherwise we would have been on the wrong end of a bit of a pasting. Don’t worry though, it’s coming - if Norwich don’t stick 3 or 4 past us next week then Soton almost certainly will in a couple of weeks time!

Worryingly I saw a few comments on Twitter last night from Birmingham fans about being glad they no longer played ’Eustace ball’ and how, despite being grateful of the job he did for them, they were now enjoying playing under a less negative manager in Mowbray. None of which inspires much confidence if I’m honest - I fear tactics like last night might become the norm under this guy. And if that’s the case you could give ST’s away for free next season and you still won’t fill the ground!!

I didn’t see the first half as I was working so can’t comment on that. But from what I did see of the second half it looked like the ball was a hot potato that our players just wanted to get rid of as soon as possible, most of the time hoofing it aimlessly down field with their first touch, which either went straight to their defenders or towards Gally who lost every single header he went up for - so same result 🤷‍♂️ Szmodics looked thoroughly pissed off as he watched the ball sail over his head time and time again.

We’ve suddenly gone into the complete opposite of what we were under JDT - from a ‘keep possession at all costs’ team to one that just aimlessly boots the ball away as soon as we get it. And whilst there were plenty on here (and loads more sat around me at Ewood) rejoicing on Saturday that “finally we’ve got rid of that passing out from the back crap”, I was never convinced that just giving the opposition CBs the ball at every opportunity was a sustainable approach and so it transpired tonight as Birmingham attacked us at will and could (and probably should) have scored 5 or 6. I’d love to see the stats from halftime up until the goal - I’d be amazed if we had more than about 10% possession - and most of that was just whilst waiting for Pears to take the goal kick!! However, it turns out that it’s actually pretty hard to score when you don’t have the ball! Hopefully this isn’t actually how the new manager wants us to play and there will be an actual game plan going forward, because if not then we will go down with barely a whimper

We go to North Wales on holiday each summer and have always seen a variety of Liverpool, Everton and Man Utd tops on display around the town. Last summer, however, hardly any of those could be seen and instead there were Wrexham shirts everywhere. Supporting Wrexham is certainly the fashionable thing to do at the moment - and let's be honest, a bit of success is always likely to attract floating fans - that's why we were averaging nearly 30,000 every week in the mid-90's. Eventually though they will reach a ceiling - they have the budget to blow away the conference and L2, maybe even L1, but nowhere near enough to threaten the really big boys - and interest will soon wane again - it's not as much fun watching a team battling to grind out mid-table finishes year after year, no matter what league you're in.

A quick look on the tour management’s website shows that Mansfield, Wigan & Stoke are all hosting similar events, so perhaps not quite as unthinkable as it maybe should be (Fwiw I’m not defending the club here, just pointing out that we’re not unique in this)

I don't know how justified it is, but I lived in Leeds for a while and down the years have had 3 or 4 Leeds-supporting friends come to this game and ask me to get them a ticket in the JWL with us as they hated being in with their own fans (at least 1 told me that they didn't feel safe going to away games anymore) - so I would certainly say there is at least some semblance of truth to it