JHRover

Relegation is estimated to cost an immediate £7 million through diminished media income. That's before everything else - tickets, merchandise, sponsorship all dropping too. Thats a year, assuming you only go down for 1 season. This is where the idiots running the club lose track of things. Last time around they sold Hanley, Duffy, Marshall and pocketed the £8-9 million thinking they were clever, yet that was wiped out by the relegation they delivered as a result Bleating on about a wage structure and not being able to offer players or potential managers better terms. Yet the costs of relegation massively outweigh paying off a failing manager, or coughing up for a much better one. So if the options are to sell Armstrong for £7-8 million, spend very little and drastically increase prospects of relegation, or keep him, but at least secure Championship status for another year, then there's a cost/benefit argument to be had. Unfortunately here there seems to be very little logic or football based decision making. If the past is anything to go by then it will be a case of do everything we can to sell Armstrong with absolutely no strategy for what comes next. Then its ring up City or Liverpool and ask if they can send someone cheap for the year.

The vast majority of clubs, most of them with better management than Rovers, disagree, and have had them on sale for weeks or even months. I think those clubs know more than Steve Waggott and Venkys and the proof will be in eventual numbers sold.

Wait until Wilder goes to WBA, do nothing, all the decent options get jobs elsewhere and then the loonies on Facebook and Twitter can base all their arguments on "who could we get FFS" as a reason to keep Mowbray in place.

So Huddersfield, one of the few sides as bad as us last season, have already made moves bringing in Rhodes and Matty Pearson on free transfers. We can debate the qualities of those two but they've got themselves, for no outlay, two experienced and proven performers at this level nice and early into the summer. What are we doing? Who knows but it isn't looking good.

Season ticket update: Clubs definitely or possibly in the Championship next season who have tickets on sale now: Huddersfield - yes - from £249 Middlesbrough - yes - from £420 Barnsley* - yes - from £235 Sheffield Utd - yes - from £357 Stoke - yes - from £294 Coventry - yes - from £210 Forest - yes - from £365 Luton - yes - from £400 Bristol City - yes - from £355 Cardiff - yes - from £249 Swansea* - yes - from £249 Bournemouth* - yes - from £550 Brentford* - yes - from £419 QPR - yes - from £225 Millwall - yes - from £385 Peterborough - yes - from £349 Sunderland* - yes - from £340 Oxford* - yes - from £299 Lincoln* - yes - from £359 * - don't know if they will be in League One or Championship yet still on sale Clubs definitely or possibly in the Championship next season who haven't bothered yet: Rovers Preston Birmingham Derby Reading Fulham* West Brom* Hull* Blackpool* * have changed or might yet change division So this means we are one of five clubs not to do anything yet despite being clear as to our position and league status and knowing that with our capacity/stadium social distancing could be achieved with relative ease compared to others with much smaller grounds or bigger demand. You can also excuse Derby and Birmingham to some degree given they were fighting relegation until the last couple of weeks and Derby are in the middle of a takeover saga. And just look at those prices. Assuming Waggott freezes or increases prices then we will be joint fourth most expensive in the division behind only Middlesbrough, Bournemouth and Brentford. Two of whom have been in promotion contention and have little grounds in much more affluent areas than Blackburn. Can't wait to see what he has got up his sleeve this summer.

Won't Kaminski have to be sold this summer, for the same reason as Armstrong, that we risk him going for nothing next year? Then it is Pears and the Greek lad for a Championship season. Not a reason to be confident really.

So why does it keep happening? Was the Ribble Valley BC thing another error or just ineptitude by the club allowing such a major plan to leak out ending up with egg all over our faces? It wasn't that hard to find. It was on Macron's main website not hidden away. Like I say, it happened a couple of years ago with 10 Bet too. The club can control it. As you say these companies are signing contracts and agreements with Rovers. Are you suggesting Macron have breached their contract already by putting it on their website? Or is the more likely alternative just that Rovers work so slowly and poorly they are late to the party with everything? Do you think for one minutes that Man Utd, Liverpool or Arsenal would allow such stuff to happen?

The point i was raising was that Macron 'announced' the deal late last week/over the weekend. It was posted on Facebook with a link to their website showing their clubs and Rovers were one of them. It happened several days before yesterday's club announcement. A similar thing happened when we got 10 Bet in 2018 and they announced it, along with our new kit, before Rovers had revealed either. Ribble Valley Council announced the Brockhall scheme several days before the club said anything that then forced them into an announcement. There's a trend here - if you follow Rovers' official channels you will be the last to find out about things.

Funny how that keeps happening isn't it? Alternative is that the people at Rovers haven't got a clue and keep getting gazumped on major announcements.

Looks like Macron have 'done a Ribble Valley Borough Council' and announced plans and deals on their own website before the club could be arsed to get round to it. These pesky third parties going off announcing things before Rovers have the chance. How hard can it be to announce things properly rather than waiting for fans to go off and unearth it on other websites forcing the club into an announcement?

Yeah if you go on the Forest website they have a decent range of Macron gear. Far bigger selection than in the umbro stuff at the club shop. It showed original prices and sale prices, their full prices were less than our Umbro sale prices. I'm OK with Macron but we will see what designs they come up with and how Waggott prices them.

Absolutely. It seems to have become lost somewhere along the line that the sole objective and metric of a professional football manager is to get results and achieve targets - points, promotions, prizes, league positions. Generally speaking only those managers that consistently achieve these last in the industry, those who can't or don't do it consistently fall by the wayside and end up on the scrapheap. Instead we get all this other nonsense. Part of it is because the manager is constantly making excuses and covering for his own shortfalls whilst dealing with idiots who don't understand football. Another part of it is the way the game is going, not just here but everywhere, where there always has to be a 'project' or 'journey' involving a philosophy and style of play. Gone are the days where a good manager goes into a club and just drags a team up. I'm not surprised Mowbray goes down the road of claiming to play nice football or claiming to use the academy a lot because these are boxes ticked on the alternative measures of a manager - when targets arent hit or results not delivered then just fall back on the other stuff. It's distraction tactic stuff deployed by a manager not getting results and lapped up by those who bizarrely attach importance to these other issues. Sadly we've ended up in a situation where the managers major failings will be forgotten and overlooked and instead he will get credit for throwing in youngsters, in the process hoodwinking people into thinking we are on another journey.

If Mowbray has been told anything of the sort about who he should use then he should resign. He is the manager and his job is results. How he does it should be inconsequential and If you want promotion you get the right manager and let him get on with it. I don't think Farke, Warnock, Wilder, Dyche and co. would ever have got promotion if they were instructed that they had to use players from the u23s. Lack of room in the budget? How can that be the case when we've got losses of £20 million a year? Where is the money going if there's no room to sign players having let 10+ go already this summer? Phil Jones, Grant Hanley, David Raya. Between them there's about £25 million in transfer fees recieved in the last 10 years. That pays for the academy.

What i know is that even in League One our manager didn't pick Chapman and he struggled to even make the bench in the Championship, spending most of his time putting in woeful performances for our u23s. If we had a new manager I might accept the clean slate and try again routine but nothing has changed here, so no. Any decision to keep him around will be purely financial in an effort to achieve some sort of payment for him or drum up bids from somewhere, not because Mowbray thinks he will be playing for us.

So much for the bright future and journey. So the business so far this summer has been to offer Elliott Bennett a new deal, invoke 12 month extensions for Nyambe, JRC and Rothwell (still no sign of long term deals), offer Amari Bell a deal which he hasn't signed and keep Harry Chapman (who Mowbray refused to play and shipped out to Shrewsbury). What's the destination again? League One?

Makes the job easier for the staff down there the less people turn up. Still get paid and can always blame Covid if the owners take any interest.

When Adam Armstrong leaves it will be because a club comes along that offers him more than this club does. It will be nothing at all to do with what fans think, or don't think, of him here. It will be because this is a club going nowhere, with no ambition, sticking with a poor manager at the end of his shelf life because it is more important to stick with good old Tone who will dance to whatever tune the owners decide than it is to shake things up and show some ambition. He will leave because he doesn't want to play for a tin pot outfit with 4,000 fans a week turning up, which is where we are headed soon. He will witness this summer unfold, will see what direction this club is heading in, and will want to move elsewhere, just like any other player of any ambition will want to do too. Convenient because I expect the priority this summer will be to sell anyone with any achievable value. It is unlikely that he has even been offered a new long term deal, because the club has been in a state of inertia for the last 12 months (except on plans to flog the training ground). So our intentions there are already clear, that's before our manager tries advertising him in the press as up for sale. We are at a club where the manager selling our star player and brining in millions for him is the ambition for the summer because it will protect his position and earn him credit with the owners. What a backward club we are.

I think Waggott and Mowbray could sort him out a new deal and I doubt Venkys would even know or care about it. I expect they think it is a minor issue and not any of the supporters business what contracts they give to their employees. For all we know they could have extended it already and just not announced it.

Presumably next season is also a write off due to Covid 19 still being around and the "unique conditions" that creates. We won't be taking a foreign training camp and will lose Armstrong so all the excuses are ready to go again. Just wait for the ones about struggling to adjust without Armstrong's goals, filling the void he leaves and transitioning to a new style of play to cope with it. Great for the Football Manager laptop brigade but depressing as hell for me.

Its Brockhall to Nunthorpe. Less than 2 hours. Lovely drive. Beautiful part of the world. How the hell did he cope playing at Ipswich and Celtic? How do others cope managing abroad? Mourinho moving between 4 countries? He's pathetic. Oldest trick in the book to trot out the family guy line, as though no other manager has kids or grandkids. Warnock has children and a family in Cornwall/Devon and works in Middlesbrough. All a carefully constructed image to garner sympathy. Repugnant using his family to do it.

I said a few weeks ago that I wouldn't be getting a season ticket, at any price, with Mowbray and his henchmen remaining at the club. I had hoped that the passage of time would lead to my anger and disillusionment subsiding and me reconsidering things. A few weeks off, calm down, put the season behind us, along with the training ground scam. But no. The more and more I hear from Mowbray the more angry I get. He's a coward and a liar and the sound of his voice alone sickens me. He's trying to be clever with the excuses and nonsense about last season. The blame lies at his door. His drivel might convince morons like Pasha and Venky's but it works in reverse for those who know what is going on.

His dad played at Ipswich in the early 90s and again in 97. Presumably knows Mowbray or Venus from there. If not then David Lowe was there at the same time so all joins up.

For the sake of repeating myself I'm not bothered about us losing Evans, Bennett, Johnson, Holtby and co. What I am bothered about is that it was abundantly clear from Mowbray's interview that he wanted to keep Evans and knows he will end up at a rival Championship club. So if we aren't even willing or able to offer someone like him a new deal when St Tony wants it then what sort of mess are we in behind the scenes? How on earth are we going to recruit better? I've heard people on Twitter celebrating Evans' departure and then suggesting he's bound to end up at Stoke. The same Stoke who are better than us. So how does that work? Wages freed up - and lets not let them erase the likes of Mulgrew and Williams who will both have been big earners - could and should provide good scope to rebuild the squad to a good level But that won't happen as we're in a state of confusion so it will be pocket the cash and rely on the youngsters. That's the recipe for relegation, especially with a deluded manager who thinks he is Guardiola

I think we'll find that everyone will be going except the kids on relative peanuts and those with year options on the same terms. The taps are off. Venky response to a poor season is to stop funding and not answer the phone. Said it last week we are at 2015 again. It will be cheap frees and kids to replace whoever we can sell. Mowbray will play along with it. Scum the lot of em. This is going to be a long dark summer and season. They'll get away with it now by letting the likes of Evans and Bennett go because most fans will be happy to see the back of them. Trouble is this isn't a football decision. Its financial. And if we can't keep these players who the hell are we going to be bringing in?

"Moving forward all I ask is they compete and give their very best" Wow. Exciting. Roll up roll up get your season tickets with a price rise for the next stage of Mowbray's reverse journey. Seems he's been burned by the bravado of aiming for the play-offs now he's realised that it isn't ever going to happen under him and people will hold that expectation against him. So instead lets just do away with any position, achievement, points tally and simply measure performance on the team 'competing' and 'giving their very best'. Of course these two elements cannot be measured nor judged and therefore can't be used to determine Mowbray's performance in future. Crafty old fool but most of us can see right through it. So from now on as long as we put 11 players out that try their best and we don't get hammered every week we're doing fine. It isn't fine and this is elite professional sport not the Dog and Duck league. This isn't amateur football or someone taking their teenage son out for a game. It's a multimillion pound operation, haemorrhaging cash with millionaires paid huge money. So no, working hard, trying their best and competing are not things Mowbray gets credit for. They are the bare minumum requirements of any professional sports club. I'm so sick of this now.