DE.

Finishing in the top half at this point would be a serious achievement. I'm not even sure we'll better last season's points total with the current available players.

How is giving him 2 minutes at the end of games better than getting the lad loaned out to play some regular football for six months? I just can't understand the club's mentality on this one.

I think Armstrong will score a few more before the season is out, and we'll get the odd goal from Travis, Graham (if Tony plans to unfreeze him at any point) Downing, Lenihan/Tosin and possibly even Gallagher (£5m... what a waste), but agree that it's looking bleak overall.

Indeed, they are now down to 7th after a third defeat on the spin which continues their appalling record against the top 8 in the division. According to the Town forum they only have 21 points from their last 19 games which is obviously not promotion form. 3 wins in 19 as well which is shocking. @chaddyrovers fair to say Ipswich fans should be a little bit concerned by this? Meanwhile Lambo not the most popular man around these parts right now...

I think we'll always sell around 8000 no matter what. These are the hardcore supporters and will go to matches irrespective of manager, performances, owners or anything else. We will struggle to get any more than that as long as we're floundering in mid-table with no obvious ambition being shown in the transfer windows though. Big summer coming up.

Tbf we were never in the top six once even when these players were available so I think that would be a weak argument.

He's been here before... https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2010/mar/25/tony-mowbray-celtic-manager-sacking

The kind of performance I feared with all of our creative outlets injured. Going to be a long end to the season I think. If Arma's purple patch is over we're going to struggle to score more than one a game which is going to put a heavy burden on our defence.

Probably the best team we could have put out all things considered.

I watched Smackdown for the first time in at least 3 or 4 weeks this week and it feels like I barely missed anything. Miz and Morrison are still doing their nostalgic tour shit and nobody cares. New Day are still antagonising them and the Usos are still around. Also Ziggler and Roode are still a team. OK. Corbin and Reigns are still involved in this never-ending feud - surely the longest feud in history that absolutely nobody gives a shit about? Elias is still doing nothing of importance, Zayn is still managing and Cesaro is still jobbing. Goldberg is advertised to appear and then it's by satellite. Just fucking lol. Way to troll your audience. The only reason I even decided to check out SD this week was because Goldberg was advertised. Fiend Vs Goldberg in Saudi does intrigue me purely on the basis of how they'll give Wyatt the win without making Goldberg look like a chode. Bryan apparently hasn't been around since losing to the Fiend so I literally haven't missed anything there. For some reason he has a match with Heath Slater and that's it, so, nothing creatively for him then? So apparently Strowman beat Nakamura for the IC title, but it's hard to care as I barely remember anything Nakamura did as IC champion anyway. Zayn is still managing him as well, for reasons. Isn't Zayn a pretty good wrestler? Why in the world has he been converted to a permanent manager? Bizarre. The Mandy Rose/Otis thing is still going on, a storyline which basically consists of "ha ha look at this fat guy dating a hot blonde". Will assumedly end with Mandy turning on Otis, quelle surprise. Sheamus/Apollo Crews... who cares. He's still feuding with Shorty G, which is just the shittiest name and gimmick ever. Why bother having Sheamus come back for shit like this? Put him and Cesaro back together already. The women's four way main event was okay, and they worked hard, but Naomi is the only one of the four who is a great wrestler. Bliss is a great character, whilst Carmella and Dana Brooke have been lost in the shuffle since 2016. I won't be watching Smackdown next week.

We had better hope Arma's purple patch continues as there aren't many goals in the team otherwise. Remove Arma from the equation and in terms of league goals you have Travis (2), Downing (2), Lenihan (2), Gallagher (3), Tosin (1), Del (3), Johnson (2), Graham (3), Buckley (1) ... of non-injured personnel Derrick Williams is our joint-second top league scorer and he isn't even a first teamer.

In order to capitalise on the league being wide open we need to gain a level of consistency, which is going to be tough considering our injury list.

Raw has been solid this year so far. In the past it was pretty much a given that the quality of the show would go up between January-April due to the Rumble/Wrestlemania, but it hasn't really been the case in the past few years as WWE has been on auto-pilot. I think the emergence of AEW and declining metrics across the board (TV deals aside) has given WWE a bit of a kick in the arse, and obviously Heyman having significant creative influence on Raw has been a big plus. A shame Heyman can't write Smackdown as well.

Yeah, I think it was clear that there was something stopping Venky's from outright removing Kean from his post. Whether that was contractual or something more sinister we'll probably never know, but the fact they had to bring in Shebby to basically make Kean uncomfortable to the point where he'd rather walk away than continue speaks volumes. I doubt the owners cared much about the legal payoff as long as Kean eventually left. As for Kean himself, he no doubt timed it perfectly to ensure he got as much possible out of the club after he left. The fact he has never had another job in the UK or indeed any remotely decent league since then says a lot. He was a very highly regarded coach before slithering into the manager's seat here so his apparent exile from any reputable footballing league or club is evidence in of itself that something very shady was going on here imo.

I don't know huge amounts about his time at Celtic either but it's generally accepted that it was a bit of a disaster. His career as a manager had been on an upward trajectory up until that point, but it was then that things began going downward for him and obviously the lowest point was being at Coventry. He was fortunate to get the Rovers job but to be fair he's done better than I would have expected overall. I don't think he's done a great job but he hasn't done a bad one either. Just somewhere in the middle, fairly similar to Bowyer. Maybe that's the limit as long as Venky's own the club. As far as his stint at WBA goes I can't place too much stock in it due to it being so long ago - things have changed a lot since then. Even Owen Coyle was able to get a club promoted during that period so I don't think the difficulty was as high as it is at present. They did drop straight back down but again I wouldn't necessarily judge him on that - even the likes of McCarthy and Warnock have struggled to keep teams in the PL and I think most of us would have been delighted if either had turned up here in the past few years. Overall I think Tony has the right general vision and ideas for the club, but not necessarily the abilities to execute those ideas properly. Imo he needs help, particularly in the recruitment department, and until he gets that I doubt we'll get very far.

TM has never been able to balance a squad properly, going all the way back to his Celtic days when he was playing six strikers at once. Not saying he should be completely removed from the transfer process but should certainly not be in charge either. Same with contract renewals - his opinion should carry some weight, but he's made too many expensive mistakes (Mulgrew & Smallwood the most obvious ones at present) to be the decision maker. Ideally should have some kind of DoF above him doing the more cerebral stuff, leaving Tony to concentrate on the footballing side of things.

Yeah that's pretty bloody worrying. Would we have been relying on Leutwiler?! A lot of the transfer window talk just comes across as excuses to me, although at least Mowbray did essentially admit it was a failure and he had failed and would have to answer for it - although I doubt it'll be much of a grilling.

Injuries are to be expected as we have a number of injury prone players (Nyambe, Lenihan, Evans, Holtby off the top of my head) but season-ending injuries are rare and we've definitely been unlucky losing Dack, Holtby and Evans in the way we have. Hard to legislate for that irrespective of how the January window is viewed.

It's up to you as to how you believe Mowbray was relaying the information. If you feel he meant it to be private and trusted it not to be blabbed elsewhere then you shouldn't say anything, but if it was just open off-the-cuff remarks then I see no reason why it couldn't be repeated on here. Totally your call.

I've seen this guy posting on Rovers FB groups and I'm pretty sure he is who he says he is.

There are definitely opportunities there for fringe players to step up and make themselves known. Maybe for youngsters like Buckley and JRC too. Very rare for so many first teamers to be out long-term like this, so somebody needs to step up and take their chance.

Only £1.3m being available to spend (does that include wages?) is pretty scary to me. That's lower level/relegation candidate level transfer budget. Unless we have a lot more in the summer to play with we are looking at an incredibly difficult 20/21 season with the amount of investment the squad is going to need.

Really shit news. The two best pure footballers at the club out injured for the season within practically a month of each other. Add Rothwell and Evans to the long(ish) injury list and it's already looking bleak for the rest of the season. Going to need some low-key performers to start stepping up quickly.

https://www.ipswichstar.co.uk/sport/ipswich-town/big-ipswich-town-interview-bartosz-bialkowski-1-6500191 Some brutally honest comments from Bialkowski about Paul Hurst's time at Portman Road: On Lambert and the season post-Paul Hurst: On Mick McCarthy: Quite rare to hear a current player speak to openly and candidly about recent events. Hurst sounds like a total buffoon. Lambert comes across as a positive person but without the answers to change a really bad situation. No surprise to hear Mick was loved by the players and it's obvious the players were hurt by the way the fans turned on him.

Judging by AEW Dark it looks like they are breaking up the Nightmare Collective. Thank god for that.