Smallwood is proven in League 1 so I honestly don't think an extra six months of not playing is going to have any major impact. I reckon he'd have a fair few suitors in League 1, maybe even a couple of teams just promoted to the Championship if he's lucky. He could go on a free in January but depending on how much we're paying him that could still be a significant amount in lost earnings for him. This is probably going to be the highest paid contract of his career so it might not be easy to walk away from financially.

He seemed happy to sit out the first six months of the season despite being told he wasn't going to feature much, and having interest in the summer, so it wouldn't surprise me if he sits out the next six months as well. If he genuinely wants to play I'm sure there are clubs out there willing to bring him in at a much reduced wage. Either that or we loan him out for a % of wage costs (probably less than 40% if it's a League 1 club though).

Happy new year everyone, have a good night and stay safe.

If it's a lot lower he's probably better off seeing out his contract here for the last six months and then signing with somebody as a free agent in the summer. The wage on offer isn't likely to be significantly different and he'll probably get a higher signing on fee if he's a free agent.

We need to get back to playing the team and style that got us onto our winning run ASAP. Appreciate Dack is no longer around but put Rothwell or Holtby there and persevere. Continuing to fool around with our tactics and line up is only going to make things worse imo. We had a winning formula briefly and that starting eleven have proved they can win matches, so go back to that and hope that somebody can fill Dack's shoes.

There were plenty of people at the time who had reservations about the sale to Venky's though. Dave Whelan being a notable one saying something about the deal not looking or sounding right. The Trust were also due to sell us to Ali Syed, a total fraudster, until he was rumbled by a BBC investigation. As far as I can see they wanted out and were willing to sell to anybody willing to stump up the cash, the club that Jack loved be damned - and damned we have been. It's not like we were bleeding huge amounts of money at the time either - within the Trust's overall portfolio Rovers couldn't have been anywhere close to the biggest money drain. Weren't we operating at a loss of something like £3m or less a season with the taps turned off? With prudent financial management and continuing letting Williams and co get on with things the Trust could have made a lot out of Rovers once the PL TV deals went through the roof - and with Allardyce at the helm I think it's highly likely we would have stayed in the division at least until then. They were very short-sighted in retrospect, selling the club for a relative pittance just to be rid of it despite huge potential being on the horizon. Hindsight is 20/20 and all the rest of it, but I don't think I'll ever really forgive them for what they've inflicted on the club and its fans by selling to our current owners.

We already have the likes of Buckley, Travis, Rankin-Costello, Davenport and even Rothwell who are midfielders looking for a chance or who are already in the first team. I'd say we have enough young, hungry midfielders right here ready to make the step up.

You'd think we have enough bloody midfielders whether it be at first team or academy level.

In fairness it could be argued our decline started when the Trust pulled almost all funding around 2008 and decided they no longer wanted the club. Mark Hughes became frustrated after not being allowed to spend (I think it might have been Diarra that was the straw that broke the camel's back?) and so he departed, and Paul Ince arrived to nearly relegate us. We then made a smart move in bringing in Sam Allardyce (albeit six months late) but it was a sticking plaster on a growing problem of funds drying up. The Trust's final act, further twisting the knife into the back of the club, was selling to Venky's and ushering in the true decline which we still very much feel the effects of today. Venky's are the ultimate villains of the piece but IMV the Trust aren't far behind.

Evans has coasted under every manager we've had so I'm inclined to side with Mowbray on this one.

No, he isn't. He has purple patches of form which inevitably fade away as he re-establishes himself in the team, gets injured or the international period ends. Even Mowbray said he has to keep Evans on the bench to motivate him.

In my dreams maybe, but in reality I'm resigned to the fact Evans will be here until he retires. I genuinely don't ever remember hearing of a single club even being interested in him.

Back to the glory days of 2015 when we were signing "talent" like Fode Koita, Danny Guthrie and Nathan Delfouneso. Good times ahead.

He's been saying this more than once over the past few weeks. Seems to be daring Evans to sack him - he was doing it earlier in the season too.

I've got up to Esthar on Disc 3 at the moment. I imagine I'll have finished it in the next few days and that'll be £10 well spent! (spoilers ahead) A bit of a shower thought but I was thinking that FFVIII's ending actually makes starting a new game quite interesting. The general suggestion from the game is that the characters are caught in an endless time loop where the heroes defeat Ultimecia, which sets in motion events which cause Ultimecia's birth in the future and subsequent attempt to compress time. So theoretically every time you start a game of FFVIII you're beginning another instance of the endless time loop. Small things can change like time spent on things, characters being in certain places at certain times, weapons, GFs, etc... but the overall plot and destination remains the same. It's kind of cool - whenever you start a new game of FFVIII you really are starting a new game, albeit as part of a time loop which can't be changed. Obviously it could just be the translation explaining the concept badly and there is no time loop though, rendering the above total nonsense.

It's a strange one as last season we were starting a lot of games quite poorly, rarely scoring in the opening twenty minutes. We seem to have solved that problem to some degree but only for the first 15-20 minutes of games, then we revert to type. I'm not really sure what to make of it. The overarching issue of only being able to perform well for parts of matches rather than significant portions remains, despite our openings tending to now be brighter and more intense. It's almost like we throw everything we have into the first 20 minutes of games and then only have a little bit left for the rest of the match.

Shines a light on Mowbray's poor defensive recruitment doesn't it? Derrick Williams or bust, and with him being injured it's bust.

There are a lot of players who 'work hard' but achieve nothing in matches. None of them cost £5m. We should expect far more than just hard work from Gallagher. What worries me most about him is that he doesn't seem to have that instinct that all decent forward players need to be in the right place to score goals. He's got a good shot on him but he's rarely in a position to show that. People can blame the other players in the team for 'not creating enough' but it hasn't stopped Dack or Graham from notching regularly since they've been here. Rhodes was similar in that even when he wasn't getting great service (particularly towards the end) he was still scoring because he just had/has that instinct of knowing where to be. I don't see that in Gallagher at all. What's strange is that for the first 15 minutes or so against Huddersfield we were pressing them and causing all sorts of problems... then we just stopped. The entire team seemed to get rattled after a couple of mistakes, collectively retreated into their shells and never recovered. I'm convinced it's poor mental conditioning. Once our confidence is rocked we really struggle to come back from it, and unfortunately rather than just spanning 90 minutes it tends to span entire portions of the season.

We tend to pick up something in the games everyone expects us to lose. Weirdly I'm less anxious about this match than I was about Wigan, Birmingham or Huddersfield. With that said a draw would be a decent result albeit tempered by the amount of points we've dropped over the past week and a bit in games we should have gotten more from. I can't see a clean sheet so the optimist in me will go for a 1-1. A loss would mean 2 points from 12 and mean we are definitely in the throes of another downward form spiral. Although it's not like 3 from 12 is much better.

I suppose it's possible we were, but if you were Brewster and looked at how most of our strikers are shoehorned ineffectively out on the wing... maybe you'd think twice.

The main difference being last year we were actually on a pretty bad run at this point in time, conceding last minute goals left and right. There was a belief that we simply had to strengthen the team or we would potentially be facing a relegation battle. We then went on a four match win streak in January, coinciding with Travis' introduction to the team in place of Smallwood, and that seemed to convince Mowbray (who claimed at the time money was available) that we didn't need to bring in anybody. Obviously in hindsight that decision was foolish as we got injuries to central defenders, having let Paul Downing go, and proceeded to go on our worst run since Venky's darkened the doors of Ewood (9 losses out of 11). This season we've just finished our good run and look set to go on a bad one just as January comes into sight. 2 points out of 9 from teams significantly lower than us in the table, injuries biting hard and our 'playoff push' beginning to derail. Theoretically it's the perfect storm for the manager to go out and bring in some bodies to strengthen the team. This year however he's saying there's no money (where did last January's reported 10m go? Or the Raya money that was to my knowledge never reinvested?) and unless Buckley suddenly improves dramatically we don't have a Travis ready to step up and bring some new energy to the team. Instead we have Samuel, Chapman, Brereton and Davenport.

Indeed, and that was in the third tier with a budget that eclipsed every other team in the division - including Wigan.

If we stop spending ridiculous amounts of money on strikers who don't score goals then maybe we can rectify that problem.

Dack played through most if not all of our 9 losses out of 11 run last season didn't he? Our swing in form back to being shit has nothing to do with Dack being injured, it's just the natural order of things under Tony Mowbray. His injury is just a convenient excuse that can now be used to cover up the real failings which extend far beyond playing level.

Honestly I'd say it's more a Rovers trait at this point than Mowbray specific. We were dealing with the same shit under Bowyer. Our form wasn't quite as dramatically polarised as it is under Mowbray but the same basic problem of not winning matches where we would be considered the better side was still prevelent. Our form suddenly imploding when within touching distance of the playoffs was also happening regularly during Bowyer's spell. It's a mental issue which has afflicted the club for some time. A combination of bringing in soft lads and employing soft managers. The talent is there but the desire and will to push beyond the boundaries and refuse to accept mediocrity just isn't.