As far as the strikers go (Armstrong, Brereton, etc), he probably doesn't see it as playing them out of position. If he's playing them as inside forwards he'd still see it as a striking position. The problem is that they almost always end up drifting wide and essentially become wide midfielders or wingers who are cutting inside, which is not the same as being an inside forward. What's concerning is that this was basically the case for the entirety of last season and all of this season, yet there has been absolutely no improvement. Our "inside forwards" are still no closer to adapting to their roles than they were at the beginning of the 17/18 season when we had the likes of Antonsson toiling in the same role.

#GiveAidyAChance Seriously though, the main reason there's this much anger is the manner of our defeats and draws. If we'd been 2-0 down at Birmingham and come back to draw 2-2 then it would have been a completely different feeling to throwing away a two goal lead. The same with the Boro match. If we'd been 2-1 up at HT against Leeds but they'd scored in the 65th and 76th minute, for example, there would be nowhere near the same resentment. It's not just that we're dropping points, it's the way we're dropping points, and it's happening again and again. It's no wonder it's leading to genuine anger towards the manager and the players. You can only disappoint people like that so many times before they snap or just stop caring. That's not to say the manager should be sacked or the players booed off the pitch, but the emotional reactions are completely understandable. I find it stranger when people - especially directly after these results - react in a totally detached way or focus on attacking fellow fans expressing their anger/disappointment over the club's failings. I'd rather be honest and heartfelt than be snide and aloof. Everybody's different I suppose.

Agreed, Mulgrew and Lenihan isn't a great CB partnership but funnily enough I think they'd make a more effective CM partnership than Evans/Smallwood. We need at least one good CB to come in and add some steel to the backline, I'd be shocked if we managed to get two.

Have to agree with you on this one. Frankly the stats speak for themselves and had you not given us two prime dead ball opportunities it's unlikely we would ever have had a sniff. We're lucky to have Mulgrew available to make the most of set pieces, but the reality is we did not deserve to win yesterday. Reminded me of when we did the double over Newcastle in the 16/17 season - again Mulgrew on hand to convert set pieces in two games we didn't deserve anything from.

Dann and Duffy have probably been our major purchases in defence (I think Duffy was about £2m), but arguably we've been hit harder by failing to buy a decent defensive centre-midfielder. Other than Evans - who cost about £500k-ish? - we've largely been stuck with average/poor players like Lowe, Williamson, Smallwood, etc in the DM position. Even Cairney who was signed as an AMC ended up on the wing for most of his time here. Full backs have also been neglected somewhat. Fact is under Venky's we haven't spent much at all across any areas of the pitch since 2012/13 - striker is an outlier only because of Rhodes and Brereton costing a combined £15m between them. Take those two out of the equation and we've been frugal for a long time now and it shows in the overall lack of quality we have across the team. Mowbray has done well in keeping and adding hard workers, but Dack aside (who was also pretty cheap) we haven't added much quality since the days of Rhodes, Cairney, Duffy, etc.

Pretty much agree with this. We lack quality in key areas and we're seeing the limits of where hard work and team spirit will get us. I don't personally think Mowbray is fully playing to the strengths of the team - he has this "inside forwards" vision that the current team just can't adapt to at this point in time - but overall we're roughly in the position most would have hoped for/predicted at the start of the season. What's frustrating is that we have seen how many teams have vulnerabilities and we haven't been able to capitalise on that, but at the same time we fall into the same category of a team with some potential which also has some serious flaws. Namely game management, defending leads and maintaining a strong performance for the entire match. We generally have one good half and one bad half, which has been a defining feature of Mowbray's time at the club thus far. The summer transfer window was definitely not good enough in terms of helping us progress for the first half of the season. Other than Reed none of our signings have made any kind of noticeable impact which is disappointing. Some may come good later (Brereton, Davenport, Rothwell) but that needs to be supplemented by signings who give us a boost in the here and now. We're still especially weak in terms of alternatives at centre forward and across the entirety of the defence. Still a lot of work to be done there.

I specifically said they weren't happy ?

Too good for league 1 but wages were too high (particularly combined with Graham and Mulgrew's age) to be considered a sensible investment for a championship club.

3-0 Sheff Utd. All goals come after the 85th minute. Mowbray assures us the inquest is at 'raised voice levels' and lessons will be learnt. Happy new year.

Tbf did we hear of interest in any of them? I remember Lenihan attracting interest but none of those three. From recollection Graham and Mulgrew wanted to leave but nothing materialised. Graham didn't even start performing well until December, which many put down to him sulking over not moving on. There's a reason Evans is the only one of Bowyer's babes in his prime that is still here.

Most clubs that go down aren't allowed to keep players like Graham, Mulgrew or Evans - in fact most clubs would have lost players like Raya, Nyambe, Lenihan and Williams too. Mowbray was fortunate to be able to keep every decent player we had and bring in even more. Promotion is promotion but we should never have been in League 1 and it was actually a little unfair for us and Wigan to be down there with such strong squads. Nobody else really stood a chance as far as automatic promotion was concerned. I don't see many people on here demanding that Mowbray is sacked. Most people are saying the opposite - frustrated by his inability to fix our problems, but aware that sacking him is unlikely to be the answer. Doesn't mean he shouldn't be critcised when the same mistakes happen over and over again though.

"And he said of his squad: “The group are very strong mentally" lol.

Pretty much all of his goals come from free kicks and penalties so I can't imagine it has much of an impact on the defence. Mulgrew is just not a great defender. He got caught out numerous times last year in League 1, but fortunately the opposition was so poor it rarely mattered. This year unfortunately it does matter, especially when he's partnered with an equally poor, out of position CB in Lenihan.

Mulgrew is a very classy player, but he's been at the heart of a defence that has regularly leaked goals for fun. Not much of a leader or organiser imo, but I suppose that has to be framed in the context of him playing outside of his natural position.

The league hasn't ended yet though. We could still fall a lot further, especially with the way our confidence seems to have evaporated in the past couple of months. Changing expectations is perfectly acceptable and normal. Nobody had any idea how the league would pan out or how teams would look at the start of the season. Now we're mid-way through we can see that there are very few "great" teams in this division, but a lot of average and poor ones. So on that basis why wouldn't expectations change? Particularly as we had a relatively good start and the only major thing holding us back is some kind of bizarre team mental block which turns the players into idiots for the last twenty minutes of matches, especially if we're winning.

I saw Mulgrew quoted as saying we need to be in the right side of these fine margins and that sums up the problem. We should be aiming for there not to be fine margins in the first place. Obviously there are going to be tight games, but the aim should be to get out on the front foot, get at least a couple of goals into the lead and then stay solid and look to finish off the opposition. Instead our players seem to think it's acceptable to live on fine margins and we just need to be on the right side of them more often. We will never get anywhere with that mentality.

The other issue we have is that our play is so slow and ponderous that we don't open up the gaps necessary for an inside forward to exploit. All that happens is our inside forward ends up just ahead of the full/wing backs, and just receives a simple pass with nowhere to go. We then either lose the ball or it ends up back at the feet of Smallwood or Evans in the middle. Playing with inside forwards requires a dynamic approach and I don't see anything like that in the way we play.

Sacking Mowbray would only intensify our problems. For real progress we need change at a much higher level.

The team isn't that young. Mulgrew, Williams, Smallwood, Evans, Graham - all regulars with a ton of experience. Where's the leadership from these lads when the pressure is on? Dack is 25 in four days so he's hardly a youngster either. As I said yesterday, too many of the wrong personality types in the team right now. Not enough leaders. The panic and fear across the team towards the end of matches is embarrassing to watch. If you think the players will just grow out of that I'm afraid you're sadly mistaken. Leadership is an inherent trait and we don't have anywhere close to enough of it in the team at present.

Great, so we just need to work out how to get the game to end once we get ourselves into the lead?

Can somebody explain to me what Mowbray's philosophy actually is? Team spirit? Not really a philosophy so much as just creating a positive working environment, which is a prerequisite for any successful team. In footballing terms I have no idea what his philosophy is. Buy strikers to play out wide and concede a lot of goals, ideally as late as possible? Not something we're going to want to persist with long term, is it? I think I have an idea of what he wants to achieve, but I see no evidence of it being close to fruition on the pitch and our transfer record, Dack aside, is pretty uninspiring.

Recent reuslts are a textbook case of how to lose goodwill and cause mistrust between the fans and the team. Cowardly performances and bad results against local rivals? Check Constant leaking of late goals? Check Inability to beat poor teams at home? Check Inability to keep a clean sheet? Check Inability to beat a team with ten men for most of the match (despite being a goal to the good)? Check And amidst all of this nonsense we've got Mowbray and the club trying to guilt people into buying half season tickets with #COMMITMENT. How about Mowbray and the club show a commitment to improving themselves first, rather than a shrug of the shoulders and telling everyone "this is where we are... oh and buy a half season ticket please" ?

It's interesting how these results seem to have been forgotten in certain quarters. We got thrashed by two local rivals within days of each other - and neither of them are even particularly good. Looking at our results since we beat QPR 1-0 on 3rd November it's not hard to see why people are getting fed up. Rovers 1-1 Rotherham - terrible home result. Rotherham score with their only shot on target, because of course they did. Preston 4-1 Rovers - fucking embarrassing. Wigan 3-1 Rovers - another shameful performance. Rovers 4-2 Wednesday - still managed to concede two against a team which had basically downed tools. Boro 1-1 Rovers - Good result in theory but Boro played 80% of this match with ten men and we were a goal up. Rovers 2-2 Birmingham - two goals up against a dire Birmingham team, only to throw it away and concede two goals in two minutes. Rovers 0-1 Norwich - 86th minute goal conceded. A single shot on target the entire match. Leeds 3-2 Rovers - a goal on 90 minutes to make it 2-1 Rovers. Still contrive to lose 3-2. Got destroyed stats wise. Who in their right mind would be happy with nearly two months of this shit? We've been a joke the past month and a half, and we've got the manager coming out talking about "positives" and "this is where we are". Give me a break. We've been an embarrassment recently and something needs to be done to halt the slide.

The same problems we're discussing now were evident from day one when we let a lead slip in the final few minutes against Ipswich - the worst team in the division by some distance. How about when we ended up 2-0 down to Reading, another awful team, and had to rely on them giving us two penalties to get back into it? How about when we nearly threw away a three goal lead at Stoke and only won because they missed a penalty in the last few minutes? We should all be concerned by this pattern of behaviour. It suggests a very weak mentality within the squad, a lack of confidence seeing out games and at a basic level poor defensive coaching. This all falls under the manager's remit to sort out.

I think Tony probably sells his vision quite well to prospective attacking signings, but his words likely don't match the reality of the situation. I'm sure that Tony genuinely does want to play with two inside forwards. It seems obvious he wants those inside forwards to be supported by the target man (in our case DG) holding the ball up and bringing them into play either via overlapping runs into the space behind DG or from a lay off to and through ball by Dack. In theory the full backs would be operarating as wing backs, also getting forward to support the attacking players through crosses or through balls behind defenders into the inside forward to either get a shot on goal or put the ball across to Graham/Dack for the shot. If that is the goal then it makes sense for Tony to be looking at players with the general skills of Armstrong, Brereton, Palmer, etc for that inside forward role as it needs the player to be mobile, energetic and decent in front of goal. The problem is that type of system is pretty attacking minded, which is the total opposite to Mowbray's naturally ultra cautious, defensive mindset. It's a little baffling to me that this is what Tony is fixated on achieving when it's clearly not based on his personal preferences as far as caution and defence are concerned. To play a system with two inside forwards, a target man and an attacking creative midfielder your team either needs to be on the front foot throughout games or be extremely quick on the counter attack. We already know Rovers are not set up to impose themselves on games, particularly with the Smallwood/Evans axis, and we counter attack at a pathetically glacial speed which makes that route of attack largely redundant. We're also not particularly dynamic or intelligent when we're on the ball. Our slow playing speed means that it's rare for us to create gaps in the opposition's defence. I think this is why the likes of Armstrong end up drifting out to the wing position as opposed to the inside forward area - they're looking for space. Unfortunately they end up out wide so often that they essentially become wingers, making the inside forward idea and concept irrelevent. It also isolates DG and Dack as they are not supported at all and basically have to try and create everything between the two of them. I have to assume the reason Mowbray is choosing to buy strikers to play up top is because he really does want to play a system which is narrow up top with overlapping wing backs providing the width as and when necessary. It just doesn't work because our players aren't (imo anyway) capable of playing such a system effectively. We would need upgrades in numerous positions to achieve what Mowbray seems to be after, and he himself would need to shift to a more aggressive, attacking mindset. I would be surprised to see either happen which leaves us stuck playing a formation and style that doesn't suit the personnel available.