For what it's worth I think we'll line up: NEW Bennett Lenihan Mulgrew Bell Evans Johnson Armstrong Dack Downing Graham Possible that Nyambe will play at RB and Travis in CM, but I don't trust Tony in this regard. Evans is on plenty of money, has a new contract and has "discipline" so I don't think it's guaranteed that he'll be on the bench, and you have to assume Johnson will be starting. RM could be Travis, Brereton, Gallagher (if we sign him) or Armstrong (albeit on the wrong side of the pitch) potentially. Graham almost certainly will be our starting striker.

We've got a MC who can play goalkeeper... good old Richie. Just stock the whole team with central midfielders. Smallwood Bennett Rodwell Mulgrew Downing Johnson Evans Adam Travis Dack Davenport

I don't know about Amoruso a cult favourite for sure but I don't remember him being a great defender. Tugay on the other hand, absolutely.

The problem is with Tony's preferred 4-2-3-1 formation from last season the DR/DL do need to contribute higher up the pitch. Tony wants the AML/AMR to play an inside forwards rather than wingers, hence putting strikers like Brereton and Armstrong in those positions, which means they tend to come in quite narrow, just behind Graham on either side. This means our wide defenders need to come forward to support the attack and put in crosses/through balls. We've seen Bell high up the pitch running towards the box numerous times, whilst Nyambe tends to stay wider and either pass inside or attempt a cross. Unless Mowbray totally changes our style our full backs are going to need to contribute more than they are at the moment, and that will be the case even more if we go with a 3-5-2 or 5-3-2 wing back style formation, which seems to be what Mowbray has attempted in the past with limited success.

Samba was similar, hence the telescopic leg! Difference is that Samba had Nelsen backing him up.

You're absolutely right that stats don't paint the full picture. I think the stats for our full backs as well as our midfielders are as much down to our tactics and style of play as it is the quality of the players. With that said Nyambe does get forward in open play so he needs to start getting a few assists at least. Fair point on Bennett, according to whoscored one of his assists came from DR and the other two from AML. The goal came from DML. His stats are poor as well but not necessarily fair to compare Vs. Nyambe due to his versatility. Also hard to expect consistency from Bennett when he's shuffled around the pitch so often.

Seems to be a common theme that when our defenders score we lose.

Was one of them in a cup match? I was only looking at league statistics (also possible the website just wasn't up to date). But yes our centre midfielders are also embarrassing when it comes to assists and goals. Evans with a zero on both. Even Smallwood got one assist. Johnson really can't do much worse.

Its really bad to be honest, and perhaps offers a glimpse into why Mowbray has had Nyambe on the bench.

Bennett was becoming something of a scapegoat towards the end of last season imo. Yes it's annoying that Tony seems desperate to fit him into the team anywhere, even at the expense of better players, but his performances generally range from average to decent. With that said 1 goal and 3 assists last season isn't really good enough and he did have a few real stinkers last season. We really do need players on the flanks who can contribute more if we are going to play wing backs. Bennett - 1 goal 3 assists Nyambe - 0 goals 0 assists (in fact Nyambe has no goals and only two assists in the last three seasons - both assists came in L1) Bell - 2 goals 1 assist Williams - 0 goals 1 assist Pretty scary statistics when you consider that these players are supposed to overlap and supply crosses for our forward players to score from. No evidence of any of them being up to the task of playing wing back.

I have a feeling Bell will always be a League 1 player at best, but I'd be very happy to be proven wrong on that. He has some good raw attributes but I wouldn't say any of them are defensive based. Either way he and Williams are a massive handicap on that side as it stands. Nyambe definitely has the potential, I just fear we're in a similar situation with Raya whereby there has been some kind of tiff between him and the manager. He was left out repeatedly at the end of last season even when Bennett was putting in consistently poor performances at RB. It feels like there's something more there than meets the eye, but I hope that's just the natural suspicion I have over everything that happens at Rovers nowadays tainting my view of the situation.

Not sure about the club as a whole, but I'm pretty sure Mowbray was happy to listen when an offer was put in for Raya. Those comments last season seemed very personal to me, like there had been a serious disagreement between the manager and the player. I've said for a while Mowbray could do with talking less. It's nice that he's willing to communicate his thoughts but sometimes less is more. You should only talk that much if you can back up everything you say, and very few managers in modern football could do that. LB for me is as crucial as CB (although GK is now obviously top priority). We can't seriously expect to go anywhere with Bell and Williams competing for that place. It's a bit embarrassing. If Bennett is still starting at RB, too, I fear we're sabotaging ourselves right from the get go irrespective of whether we bring in a decent goalie and/or CB.

Probably would have been better not to immediately sell our first choice GK if we were worried about adding 0s to transfer fees! The fact is everybody knows our defence is shit. They only have to take a look at last season's GA column or watch a match from any time pre-April. Mowbray doesn't need to "play poker" when it comes to us needing defensive reinforcements as it's absolutely obvious that it's necessary, even more so at GK as we literally don't have a first team GK as it stands (anyone with a brain will know Leutwiler is just backup). None of us know what is going on behind the scenes. We can only assess what has transpired so far and compare to what Mowbray told the fans would be happening at the end of the season. So far defence not strengthened, neither Smallwood nor Evans moved on, our only decent goalkeeper sold and we've recruited a couple of 30+ freebies with another two essentially on trial (Butters technically 29 but sounds like he's already in the mid-30s stage of his career). Still some weeks to go until the end of the window but I doubt anybody would have been too pleased a couple of months ago if they'd been told the above would be the extent of our business going into mid-July.

To be honest I don't think last season was about lack of experience, it was about a lack of leadership, a lack of defensive quality and a lack of tactical nous from the manager (and repeatedly poor team selections). We had plenty of experience in Mulgrew, Conway, Rodwell, Williams, Evans, Bennett and Graham but none of them are leaders and other than Graham and Mulgrew (for the first few months anyway) there isn't much quality there either. I don't buy that we must sign older players to sort out last season's problems. It's just an easy way to excuse Mowbray bringing in ageing, cheap players on short-term contracts to fill spaces in the squad because we clearly have very little to play with money wise.

When you only get two players out of it when there were so many other positions that also needed upgrading then it isn't exactly a fast build tbf.

Hah, we'll be lucky to get £2m for the lad at this rate let alone £20m. Big season for Brereton next season, he really needs to show what he can do, and Mowbray needs to give him the opportunity to do so. If we get another season like this season where Mowbray shunts him out wide for 15 minute cameos every so often then I think the fans have every right to be heavily critical of the money wasted on that transfer.

I watched FFVII: Advent Children for the first time in a while yesterday. It gets a lot of criticism but I really like it. I love how the characters are rendered and I dig the story. Granted if you watched it without knowing anything about the game you wouldn't have a clue what was happening, but why would you even watch it to begin with if you hadn't played the game? As far as I can tell it was made specifically for fans of the game, so I don't consider that a negative. It's nice that the movie just gets right into it, rather than trying to explain everything in case the person watching never played the game. For what it's worth the "complete" version, which was the one I watched, is definitely superior to the original cut and fleshes out the story nicely. The end battle between Cloud and Sephiroth still looks great. The graphics look a little dated by modern standards, but considering the movie is 15 years old it still holds up remarkably well in my opinion. It's a huge upgrade on The Spirits Within, which was only released 4 years before Advent Children.

If Mowbray's plan hasn't come to fruition by the end of next season I can see Nyambe, Travis, Lenihan and Dack being shifted to get back any money spent over the last two windows, leaving us with the likes of Mulgrew, Bennett, Downing, Johnson, Graham, Smallwood, Evans and assorted other players who aren't good enough or too old to make a difference. Right back to where we were in 16/17.

https://www.whoscored.com/Players/135724/Show/Harrison-Reed He only played 8 times in CM tbf, and it looks like he did alright. Granted I have no idea how those ratings are calculated, but our best performance of the season, the 2-0 win against Derby, came with Reed and Travis in the centre. Evans and Smallwood's "discipline" did nothing for us imo. We would have been better off with Reed there even if he wasn't as robotic and boring as Mowbray would prefer.

https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/sport/football/rovers/news/17563991.why-rovers-boss-has-gone-with-smallwoodevans-over-loanee/

He ain't coming back here to train under the guidance of Evans and Smallwood. Nor should he. Stupid and insulting comments from Mowbray.

Relegation.

If that's the case then I can't see us offering the type of wage that would interest him, especially if there's a £5m fee included.

I think we'd struggle with 4-4-2 as we don't have the wide players to provide defensive cover for the flanks, and Nyambe and Bell would need protection. Theoretically you could put Bennett on the right wing and he would cover defensively, but he wouldn't provide enough assists to make it worthwhile.

My guess is that we'll start off trying to play wing backs, it won't work because we don't really have the personnel for it, and we'll hastily revert to the sludgy 4-2-3-1 we used most of last season.