You've spent the last 18 months telling me that managers like Hughton, McCarthy and Warnock are dinosaurs and you wouldn't want them or their style of play near Ewood. Now you're saying you'd be happy to win 1-0 through an own goal and don't care how we win.

If I were a Newcastle fan and the first step the new owners took was to appoint Frank Lampard as manager I'd be very underwhelmed.

The interesting part about this for me is that even though the Saudis are the majority owners, with 80% of Newcastle, they are in business with Staveley and the Reubens who each own 10%. The public front of the deal ever since the start has been Staveley - she was the one at St James' Park watching games, she has been the one at the ground this week shaking hands with the fans and doing TV interviews. If the Saudis were so bothered about getting into football they could have bought any club in the world, at any time, yet have done nothing whilst rival regional powers Abu Dhabi and Qatar have taken over Man City and PSG and before those takeovers were increasing their involvement in the sport through lucrative sponsorship deals with Emirates, Etihad, Qatar Airways, sponsoring Barcelona etc. It looks to me as though they have been sold a 'project' by Staveley who was on the lookout for serious cash to bankroll her plans. The Saudis could have just cut her out of the equation, bought the whole lot from Mike Ashley and done everything on their own terms, yet are preferring to do it as part of a group. I don't know what that means but it is clearly a different arrangement to the takeovers at City and PSG. The Saudis are a long way behind on their involvement in the sport. Maybe they've seen the positive publicity it has had for those other powers and fancy a bit of the same, but again I wonder why they are doing it in conjunction with others. The one at Man City was very much driven by the Abu Dhabi group - from the word go they owned the lot and made entirely their own decisions and appointments and followed their global plan with the City Football Group - buying or setting up other clubs around the world. It will be interesting to see how things go but I'm not sure it is going to be so simple as just blowing everyone out of the water and appointing Zidane or Conte as manager. To begin with I don't think the PL or UEFA will allow it.

Wish he'd buy us and send this lot packing.

Ah right. So being under an embargo might have stopped us signing a full back from Lincoln? Thank the lord we didn't! We were under an embargo. It was released early on in the summer. You know this, let's not pretend it didn't happen. Speaking of "more financially sensible" in our future dealings you can't be comfortable that the people running it are the same who authorised contracts for Gladwin, Smallwood, Hart and Leutwiler because it was nice.

They probably don't realise it but the way Ashley has run them has probably been what has attracted the Saudi consortium to them. The fact that he has them established in the Premier League but on a stable and manageable footing, not much debt, no big losses and with obvious potential there will make them a lot more attractive than say had he bankrolled them to massive losses every year.

We went into an embargo didn't we? What difference would an embargo have made to our summer transfer business? With or without we would still have been able to sign all the loans.

One thing I don't really get is why the Saudis have done this as part of a consortium. I get that Staveley might be the broker who sorted the deal out and brought the Saudis to the table but don't really get the involvement of the Reubens. They are each billionaires in their own right who could have bought the club alone if they had wanted to. So why would either of them want to do it in tandem with others? For the Saudis they certainly don't need anything off the Reubens. The Reubens will be playing second fiddle to the Saudis with their minor shareholding. Just seems a strange way to do it for people with a bottomless pit of cash who can do whatever they want.

One of the reasons I want Mowbray and Waggott out of the club as soon as possible is that they have overseen this outrageous situation on contracts and wages. Let it not be forgotten, as much as they would like to erase everything before this season, that they authorised contract extensions for Graham, Leutwiler, Samuel, Smallwood and Downing in the summer of 2020 for no reason other than they wanted to be nice and for the lads to finish the season off together. How nice. I'd have had no particular issue with that decision if those players were integral to our season and we were relying on them to help us finish strongly. But when push came to shove they barely featured or were limited to a few sub appearances. Beyond that there was no intention of keeping them past the end of the season and all were released that summer (except Downing who was mucked around before we finally offered him a new deal months later). Fast forward a little over 12 months and all of a sudden I am supposed to accept or sympathise with the claim that we cannot afford to pay the likes of Nyambe more than he is on? Well I'm afraid I don't. What an absolute pigs ear these charlatans have made of things. Plenty of cash sloshing around to be nice to Smallwood and Gladwin but not enough to pay Nyambe the going rate for a now senior Championship RB. I think the only thing that annoys me more than the above is the amount of Rovers supporters who just instantly leap to a position of believing the Waggott excuses - that these players or their agents are making unreasonable demands that poor old Rovers simply can't comply with and that they are doing their bit to 'protect' the club and owners from such greed. Another one that annoys me are the FFP brigade, who spend every opportunity reminding us about how constrained we are by these rules, how we are close to the limits, how the poor owners can't put more in to sign new players. Yet allowing assets like Nyambe to run their contracts down is just about the worst thing you can do if concerned by FFP. We've put the hard yards and investment into him, got him to a stage where he would be worth millions, then shot ourrselves in the foot by allowing him to go for nothing. On top of that we then have to replace him with no money - we all know it will be another teenager on loan. It's nonsense, yet so many just believe it. Just like people believed the bullshit from Mowbray about Patrick Bauer's agent demanding £40,000 a week to come here and wanting guaranteed starts. Lies lies lies as proven by him soon after joining thrifty PNE. Sooner we are rid of these charlatans the better.

16 points from a possible 33 this season is less than 50% of available points collected. Over a full season at that rate you would be looking at mid-60s points wise which will almost certainly be short of finishing 6th. Not a bad return and should be well inside the top half with it but not really anything to be shouting about. Let me repeat that finishing 6th is not the holy grail or benchmark. It would be nice to actually finish in the top 6 but it doesn't in itself represent an accomplishment unless you get through the play-offs and win promotion or you use it as a springboard to go again and one better after that.

I wonder if the old 'but Player X won't want to move up to the North' tale will appear in the case of Newcastle. I frequently hear how players don't want to move 'up Norf' to join Rovers yet I think we will see once again that when the offer is right, the money is right and the project is right then players will move anywhere and certainly a couple of hours drive up the road. Our problem of course isn't location or players not fancying a drive up here but that we don't pay enough and nobody with ambition would want to come here. Of course for the excuse makers at Ewood it is easier to run with the 'location' one.

They'll wait until Reading are mathematically safe in mid-table before imposing it in March like they did with Birmingham.

I'm a bit of a selfish so and so. I couldn't really care less who does what in the PL whilst we aren't part of it. That would no doubt change were we to get back there but that isn't something I need to worry about for the forseeable. The only interest I have is ensuring the dingles get relegated. So I suppose if Newcastle can strengthen in January and get away from trouble that is one less side for the dingles to finish above.

It will be interesting to see what all the equality and diversity people have to say about it. Or just like Qatar next year will it be a different story when the money starts flowing in.

Too little too late. Many people on this website have been concerned and warning about the impact of disastrous pricing and ticketing policies on the numbers turning up. That was all ignored and only now, 2 months into the season, is the reality of the situation hitting home with the 'powers' that be at Ewood. Is this Waggott listening to genuine concerns or rather Waggott only now realising what a complete mess he's made of things and taking steps to try and shut the stable door after the horse has bolted? Much, much easier to keep hold of fans whilst you have them on the system as season ticket holders than it is to try and regain them after they're off the grid. At some point in the last 18 months the club has lost around 2,000 season ticket holders. A massive problem for anyone but for a club such as ours, starting on only 8000 to begin with and reliant on season ticket numbers to keep overall attendances up with minimal matchday buyers it is critical. Hopefully this is ownership and shadow man getting concerned and putting pressure on Waggott to sort it out. In reality it is probably just Waggott's penny dropping later than everyone else's and realising he's destroying our support base. He won't be willing/able to keep on dishing out 1,000+ freebies every week to keep the numbers up. Got to laugh at the latest marketing/excuse ploy which seems to be to repeatedly describe the team as 'Tony Mowbray's Young Side'. Almost as though the last 3 years never happened and this guy has just arrived into the club and is making the best of a tough situation, not that he's responsible for the mess and situation. I truly believe that serious action will engage fans more than any price or promotion. Unless you are going Huddersfield/Bradford style and dropping season tickets to less than £200 an adult and pushing them like mad then the only way people will get excited is through a promotion push, or ambitious steps on the football side - new manager, better players. Sticking with boring Tony without whom the Club wouldn't exist and whose form collapses every time the top 6 is in reach certainly isn't going to get bums on seats.

I'm confused. What 'lack of income' did we have last year compared to any other club in the League? Why have we been so seriously affected by this whereas others haven't had to slash back on their spending? Also, the sale of Armstrong will have cleared the vast majority of those losses, no? You mention FFP as though this is something we have avoided, but I thought we were under an embargo earlier this year? The bulk of our income continued to flow during Covid. We still had sponsorship, merchandise and most importantly media income. The thing we missed out on was ticket money, but we refused refunds on that so this was limited to the season 2020-21. Given we couldn't be bothered putting season tickets on sale until mid-September and then bizarrely decided to increase prices during a pandemic I think that tells us all we need to know about how important that area of income is.

Shock horror, Nixon links one of our players with a move away from Rovers in his Sunday rag. To be fair any player with ambition and desire to progress will be off. Can't blame them really. Why would anyone want to stay here with Captain Mowbray and his buddy running the place? If I could jump ship I would.

Why would you believe a word that Waggott comes out with? Recently he was going round saying Lenihan was 'days away' from signing a contract extension. Tickets, prices, signings, contracts, just about everything he says is going to happen doesn't. Of course if you think about things logically he is going to tell people what they want to hear. Some of us will live in fantasy land and believe everything he says and others (like myself) wouldn't trust him with £5 to buy a paper and a pint of milk and expect to get anything back. I think it is a pretty fair assumption to make that whatever 'offers' have been made to our senior players aren't good offers. If they were then at least one of them would have signed on by now. The fact that all the senior players have refused whatever they've been offered (and I'm not sure I believe that we've even got to making serious offers yet) tells me that they must be derisory if they are there at all. When you say we have 'invested' in Buckley, Dolan, Wharton what do you mean exactly? I expect they will be on very small wages in the scheme of Championship clubs and we will be forced to lose them soon too. We've lost numerous backroom staff to lower league clubs. You know this as well as I do. I can't be bothered naming them all now but there are plenty of these people who have jumped ship to lower division clubs. That doesn't happen unless there is something wrong. This, in my humble opinion, is a club in crisis. One look at Mowbray's miserable demeanor tells me that, but he and his mates have managed to survive the exodus and keep their lucrative employment going so he'll keep on rolling with whatever comes his way.

There is a mandatory 10 day isolation requirement for arrivals into India along with 2 PCR tests. Unless Mowbray has got special dispensation from the Indian government then he will not be able to go. If the meeting is taking place elsewhere - e.g. Switzerland - then this will be with Balaji and his cohorts and not with the Desai couple who control the purse strings. This is a double edged sword. As I said the other day I think the only way Rovers sees any investment in new players or contracts for our existing players is via a face to face meeting with the owners. Sadly I think this also means that Mowbray gets a contract extension. So do we hope Mowbray's contract expires but with it those of our 'best' players or do we hope he gets some cash for January and approval on new deals but with it a new contract himself. I'll be honest the prospect of enduring him until May is tough enough but beyond then I can't comprehend. This is probably all pie in the sky stuff because as above, I can't see him going to meet the owners in any event, or certainly not the ones that matter.

Here's another valid and important point - how come most other Championship sides, many of them smaller clubs than Rovers, can accomplish the same mid table mediocrity that we can on a fraction of the losses? This is an important point because it comes back to how the club is run and how quickly and relatively easily that huge figure of £20 million could be substantially reduced whilst still sustaining the same as we have now. It is one of the biggest myths going that the only way we can survive at this level is by having owners willing and able to pump in £20 million each and every year. The reason these owners are doing that is because of their ongoing negligence and mismanagement. If employing Steve Waggott and Tony Mowbray for nearly 5 years is the sum total of your interest and investment in the club then you deserve everything you get. These two no-hopers left Coventry City in ruins and walked into this job after being overlooked at clubs like Chesterfield, Southend and Gillingham. Employ better and get better results. Not just on the pitch but off it also. Anyone tell me how much the Blackpool owner is set to lose this year on his club? Or Hemmings at Preston? Or Berylson at Millwall, or whoever owns Luton? Halve that £20 million and then knock another chunk off. Why can't we do that and still finish mid-table? And no - the answer isn't facilities or the academy. At most the Category A academy costs us an extra million or two a year to run and it more than covers its outlay on the players we've developed through it. As far as I can tell all those other clubs also have grounds and training pitches most of which are better maintained than Ewood. If anyone can explain the above then maybe I'll accept that we need £20 million a year benefactors. Until then I simply don't accept it. And the debt figure is another myth. That figure isn't debt - it is their tab for their 'management' of the club over the last decade. They've chosen to do it that way which is entirely their right but it isn't debt and they aren't having it back. Nobody is paying it and the Club certainly can't.

Apparently because we got Kaminski over a year after selling Raya we had the last laugh. Don't mention that he will be another one we are forced to sell soon as we can't or won't give him a proper contract extension.

Claudio Ranieri being linked. Strange one but might know their Italian owners. They get criticism but it nearly always works in getting Watford where they want to be. 5 years in the Prem, 2 automatic promotions, a play off final and an FA Cup final all in the time we've drifted around the middle/bottom of the Championship and gone nowhere but at least we haven't upset St Tony and he and his mates have had 5 years cash for it. No room for nice guys in this game.

Who says he is going to India? I bet he'd love that opportunity but number 1 on the list would be nailing down his position and by extension his cronies. Waggott is probably starting to sweat on the situation. There's no doubt in my mind that the minute he gets direct access to the clowns in Pune he will secure his future for another couple of years. Him and Waggott already have the excuse book for their reading and sadly, as so many of our fans have, the owners will swallow it. Sadly for us him getting to India and getting a new deal might also be the only way the owners allow any cash to be spent. If he's going or being replaced by an outsider next summer they won't want to trust him with cash until he's knelt at their feet.

Ah so my prediction came true then. A poor defeat but an improved second half to send people home calm yet disappointed rather than angry. A defeat is a defeat whatever way you want to dress it up. Weren't Blackpool one of those clubs we'd end up like if/when Venkys left? Anyway, glad I decided to go away for the weekend instead of going to watch more of Mowbray Rovers. When the owners and club start taking this seriously I will. Bored with it all really.

Prediction. We will be much improved in the second half, have loads of possession, a few chances, put a crap Blackpool side under some pressure but fall short and probably concede a third late on but Mowbray will escape the fans wrath because we improved and tried hard.