20 hours ago, Waggy76 said:

True too a point but there are a lot of Liverpool and Everton supporters in North Wales .....

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.

On 01/01/2024 at 22:03, JHRover said:

This would be unthinkable at any other Football League club. I include Accy Stanley in that who I can't believe would plunge to such depths.

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)

On 04/12/2023 at 21:25, Upside Down said:

This reputation that Leeds have, is it justified? Or is this just a bunch of pissed up lads givin it the big un and a few fist fights?

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

10 hours ago, Polky said:

I feel your pain, I’ve been going to Ewood with my old man since I was young. He’s not well enough to go anymore and my wife has been accompanying for the last six seasons.
 

She didn’t want to waste anymore weekends at Ewood so it’s just me now 😂 

Let me know if you fancy getting a pint before the game sometime. We could start a lonely fans club 🤣🤣

I’ve had a season ticket at Ewood ever since the early 90’s and have always gone to games with my dad and my son (who started coming with us in the mid 00’s)
This season, however, my dad’s health has meant he has had to give up his season ticket and my son has gone off to uni so, at the age of 45, I’m suddenly finding myself in need of making some Rovers supporting friends to save the match-going experience becoming a frustrating/lonely one. 

Particularly, I wondered if there’s anyone on here from Rossendale (I live in Bacup) that would be interested in sharing lifts to and from Ewood?

20 hours ago, Tyrone Shoelaces said:

Did they really bid £31 million for that full back they had on loan from Chelsea ? That’d be crazy. Maybe they meant £3.1 million ?

The most interesting bit of that is that, seemingly, it was the player himself who vetoed the move - after a year on loan sampling what it was like to play for the club and, in particular, the manager, he'd rather stay as 3rd choice at Chelsea. Like I say, interesting...

Lots of blame on here for Pears for the third goal - and certainly he doesn’t cover himself in glory - but (just in the interest of balance) both Carter & Scott Wharton f*ck up their headers too and that goal is just as much on them as it is on the keeper 

Was at the game yesterday, plus have seen the short highlights on the Sky sports app.

My views, for what it’s worth -
no complaints on the red card, it’s a mistake from Pickering (who got away with a similar one just a moment or so before) and then it is compounded by the foul. Obviously, with hindsight, it would have been better to have let the lad go on and have a shot, and if he scores we’re 1-0 down but still 11v11 - but in the heat of the moment it isn’t always possible to think quite so rationally. 
From that point on though I thought we were very good. We didn’t just retreat and sit back like Rotherham did against us last week, but we still looked to press and get forward when we could - that said, however, after we took the lead personally I would have liked to see us shut up shop - bring Garrett on for Ennis (I know that would have been cruel, but needs must), and go to a 4-5-0 formation almost, let the defence sit deeper and just try to keep everything in front of us - if they score a screamer from 30 yards so be it, but to allow space in behind like we did for their goals is just criminal really. 
I thought Hedges was our stand out performer - and unlucky not to be given MotM. Calm on the ball, always available for a pass and worked like a trojan all game. 
Gallagher was very good when he came on and took his goal very well - although then missed another chance - so perhaps just a typical Sam Gallagher type of game 🤷‍♂️
Equally, Ennis did ok, but should have done better with his chance (and it wasn’t a penalty in the aftermath, despite what my son who watched at home tried to tell me!)
Pears was exceptional for 80 minutes - kept us in the game with a number of good saves, even at 11v11 (Wharton, JRC and Travis all have him to thank for sparing them from being the villain of the piece) - but then had a horror show for their second. The first goal, I don’t think you can blame him for,  but the second…
He just seems to lose where he is in relation to the goal, which I think is a consequence of having to back-pedal as he was playing almost as a sweeper. Incidentally, I remember Kaminski doing something similar in one his first matches for us (maybe at Watford) - and then after that he seemed to stay in his area more (perhaps under orders). Again, if we’d sat deeper at 1-0, and even at 1-1, then that goal, and that error, wouldn’t happen 🤷‍♂️

All in all, not the most enjoyable afternoon, but far better than I expected after 17 minutes, when the red card came out, and I came away feeling proud of the team. If we play with that kind of spirit and effort all season, I think we’ll win more than we lose

Anyway, trying to keep positive - 3 or 4 points from our next two games (against teams who, whilst obviously very good, don’t really have anything to play for) should mean we go into the final game with the playoffs within our grasp 

I’m struggling to shake off the disappointment tonight - I’m normally pretty relaxed about results, win, lose or draw, but that one feels like a really tough one - maybe it’s coming so soon after what happened on Wednesday, I don’t know, but I just feel sick at the moment. 
God knows how the players must be feeling 

18 hours ago, Tyrone Shoelaces said:

They might have still sent the keeper up or they may not have done. At least you’re asking them a question, to come up with an answer.

The question you’re asking is ‘are you willing to risk conceding a second goal in order to try and get an equaliser?’ and the fact that the keeper has gone forward means they’ve already answered yes. 

Don’t get me wrong, on most corners I agree with you - leaving a player, especially someone short and quick like Dolan, up front makes sense, but in that situation, in the last minute of a game where you’re leading, where we were already short-handed because they’ve brought everyone including the keeper up, it would be foolish in the extreme 

2 hours ago, Tyrone Shoelaces said:

I still can’t figure out why teams bring everybody back to defend corners. Would the goalie have come up if we’d have left Dolan on the half way line ? It’s not like he’d be much help in defending a corner anyway.

In answer to the question in bold - Yes. It was the last seconds of the match and they were losing - sending your keeper up at any point is essentially conceding that getting a goal back is worth risking losing another one. No matter how many players we'd left on the halfway line it wouldn't have changed the decision to send him up for that corner.

And, it was actually the ref stopping play for pushing etc before the corner that allowed their keeper time to get forward. He came into the box fairly late whilst the ref was talking to players and sorting out the melee, and no one seemed to notice him at first. Szmodics does eventually, but he's already marking a player - you could see him mentally weighing up whether to leave his man and get the keeper or not, and ultimately he stayed with his original man, which is why the keeper has such a free run into the 6-yard box. With hindsight Szmodics should have tried to block his run off, but if he had done that and then his original man had come through and powered in a header then we'd all be asking why that man wasn't marked!

1 hour ago, tomphil said:

But...

Putting on a winger at full back, installing traffic cone Morton who only has instincts to stand on the edge of his own box and putting a 5 ft player in place of a 6'4" one, asking him to do the same job, are collectively all counterproductive to whatever he was yelling i'm afraid.

I'm sure you know this, as I'm seen it mentioned more than once on here already, but all the changes last night were forced on the manager by players needing to come off. Who on our bench would you have brought on different to JDT last night? The options left on the bench were Kaminski, Phillips, and Dack.

Did anyone see this?

Pearson eventually got a second yellow card for mouthing off to the referee, but John Buckley must be wondering how he managed to avoid getting two straight reds!

54 minutes ago, Tyrone Shoelaces said:

The first time I saw him play for Leicester  I thought “ That’s the new Alan Shearer “. It didn’t turn out that way although he had a long and successful career.

I remember thinking the same - that he would take on Shearer’s mantle with England once Big Al had retired - but I don’t think he ever had the same kind of drive and determination that Shearer had. I’d love to have seen what he’d have become with Kenny as his manager though. 
 

Incidentally, I heard a former Leicester player talking on the radio a while back (not sure who though) and he described Heskey as one of the best centre backs he’d ever played with - apparently during knock-about games in training Emile would always drop back and play centre back and this guy on the radio said he was brilliant there - in fact he was convinced that, had he played regularly in that position, he would have gone on to be one of the all-time greats. He also said that he had thought Heskey would eventually end up playing there towards the end of his career, a la Dion Dublin, and was surprised that it had never happened 

5 minutes ago, Tyrone Shoelaces said:

How was the scorer of the second United goal not offside ?

He was behind the ball 

3 hours ago, Exiled_Rover said:

Morton passes backwards and sideways (and ducks out of tackles).

Wharton, Buckley (and Garrett) have taken the game by the scruff of the neck at times and driven us forward. As I said, it took 70 minutes for Morton to turn on the ball and run into the acres of space in the centre of the park (and even then seemed unsure what to do with the ball).

He's been a good loan signing because he's 'fine' and has been available all season, but at this point he should be 4th choice for the CM role.

Really don’t get all the criticism of Morton. He’s not been outstanding, but he’s certainly not as bad as you would believe if all you read was this site.

 I do think some of it comes down to the fact that he’s on loan and so therefore not really our player. Every other player in the team makes mistakes and gives the ball away, probably to a similar degree to Morton, but he seems to get criticised far more than most. 
An example of if from last night - at one point he misplaced a pass and a guy behind me started shouting, saying ’F’ing Morton, he’s always giving it away’, ‘Take him off’ etc. Fast forward a few minutes and Travis misplaces a simple 5-yard square ball intended for Morton and instead plays it straight to the defender - cue the same guy behind me ‘F**king Morton again - why’s he not getting that?’

9 minutes ago, 47er said:

Its an utter embarrassment. No other team did it but we did it twice.

You just can't get around that.

Lots of other teams have done it, we just don’t normally hear about them. But just this year, there was one involving a Chelsea player going out, plus another involving a Forest defender going to Belgium

There are other examples on arbitration decisions on the EFL site - including one involving Forest being late with paperwork when they tried to sign Kamil Grosicki from WBA

14 minutes ago, jim mk2 said:

O’Brien will want compensation. His career has effectively been put on hold if not set back by 6 months to a year through no fault of his own. His earning power has possibly been reduced. This could cost Rkvers big time 

O’Brien’s career is on hold for 6 months because Forest chose not to include him in their 25-man squad - not because Rovers f*cked up the transfer. We could have changed our mind and pulled out of the transfer at the last minute, or LOB could have done, and the outcome would have been exactly the same. 
 

Transfers break down all the time for all kinds of reasons - yes we don’t come out of this smelling like roses, but any claim for compensation from either Forest or LOB would be laughed out of court.

If not presumably we can claim compensation from Nice for cancelling the loan of that striker at the last minute, or from Denis Undav for changing his mind and deciding to stay with Brighton 

2 hours ago, den said:

Rovers had all of January to sort out loans. There has to be a deadline that applies to all clubs and the league will be obliged to apply that strictly to every club otherwise the lawyers will be at them. I don’t think Rovers failings here have anything to do with the rules.

 

Like I said, I’m not excusing the failings that Rovers have obviously made here - and I agree that rules have to be the same for everyone 

But, I still think that the application of the rules is overly pedantic. If the 7 seconds late quoted above is correct (and I have no idea if it is or not, but the case file on the EFL website of arbitration between themselves and WBA is a similar case where the deadline was missed by 15 seconds) then logic dictates that the agreement must have been signed before the deadline, and probably even sent before the deadline, just received seconds too late, and I’m just not sure what the EFL gains by being so hard & fast on the deadline - or to put it another way, what real advantage has the club in question (Rovers in this case, but WBA previously and who knows how many others) gained from those few seconds?

Imo, a better way would be that all documents, agreements etc have to be signed prior to the 11pm deadline (with proof being a time-stamped photo or something similar) and then submitted within 24 hours - I’m fairly certain that the staff at the EFL and Premier League etc, who have to ratify these deals would much prefer a more calm & leisurely submission process too

16 hours ago, Nuttall is lost said:

Crap chants.  

 

Keeper taking a kick out  ''you're shit ahahaah''

----- -------- FC are by far the greatest team the world has ever seen and its ---------   ------------

The ones that annoy me are the pathetic ones goading the home fans - “your support is f**king shit” or “_________’s a shithole, I want to go home”

They’re just pointless imo - every team’s fans sing them at every ground so they’ve lost all meaning. I’d much rather sing in support of my team and the individual players - I’m just not sure that singing for 90 minutes that the place you’re in is a shithole does much to inspire or fire up the players

On 31/12/2022 at 21:00, MCMC1875 said:

The above is organised transport from Yorkshire for a Christmas game 68 years ago. Waggott has told the Fans Forum he can't find coaches. 68 years on and the "club" is scratching around Blackburn primary schools now. Think about that.

I’m a governor at a primary school. We’ve just had to make the decision to stop trips out for the children as the cost of hiring coaches has more than doubled from 3 years ago - taking a class of kids anywhere now has a starting cost of over £20 a head, and that’s before you factor in the entry price of where you’re going 

2 hours ago, WacoRover said:

Great way to start the New Year. Still in 3rd, and not looking quite as shaky as before. 
But, no mistaking it, Cardiff can’t score, and they gave us lots of worries in that regard. 

Now for FA Cup match. I would like to see us go fairly deep in the competition. We can take Norwich. 

Did they? I don’t remember any clear cut chances for them, nor any saves that Kaminski had to make

2 hours ago, RevidgeBlue said:

Completely unconvincing but my god we needed that. Was a "must win" game if ever there was one.

How the fuck does Gallagher play every minute of every game unless injured? He doesn't have a single redeeming quality, at least Chris Brown used to attempt to put himself about  physically, Gallagher doesn't even do that.

Thought Garrett did well, game to forget, three points, move on.

Which of Hirst or Vale would you replace him with?
He plays because what we have behind him is worse. Hopefully that will be rectified this month and Gally can become the backup to someone better.

On the game, I thought we played reasonably well, dominated the game, should have won more comfortably and never really looked threatened. All in all a good day’s work

I’ve seen a few comments on here about us being ’boring’ (and the guy who sits behind me was apoplectic on this point most of the afternoon), but I’m not really sure what people want.
We dominated the game, created a number of decent chances and, with better finishing, should really have won 3 or 4 nil. I realise that it’s not exactly Bielsa-ball, 100 miles an hour, but very few teams are 🤷‍♂️
 

And, finally, given what happened on Thursday with Buckley (which many on here seemed to accept as the right decision), I think Cardiff can think themselves very lucky to have ended the game with 11 men 
(incidentally I particularly enjoyed Hedges reaction to having the ball flicked - I mean violently thrown - at him by one of their players in front of the Riverside 🤣)