I'm not sure how this is feasible in the Football League. Take Accy Stanley. Putting next season into 'hibernation' with no definite start date might save them the costs of hosting fixtures and paying bills to open the stadium up, but they are still going to be committed to all sorts of other costs whether games take place or not. They will still have plenty of players on contracts who will need paying. The furlough scheme is likely to be gone well before football can resume with crowds. They will still have to pay their groundsman, maintenance staff, admin staff yet advertising and sponsorship will plummet. Rovers will be similarly affected. Unless there is some massive cash injection from the Premier League, FIFA, government etc. to enable clubs to pay their staff and expenses for 6-12 months to see them through the hibernation period i can't see any way it will work.

It's quite clear to me that the reason there is the desperation to get Premier League and Championship football back on asap in some form or another is down to the TV companies and the cash they stand to make/lose from this pandemic. At the moment they have a captive audience of a football starved population sat at home bored in front of the TV all night and weekend. Sky and BT will have seen their viewing figures plummet over the last couple of months and if it continues much longer i suspect many will be questioning whether to cancel their subscriptions. There's only so many repeats and inane Gary Neville discussions people can listen to before having enough. They will be salivating at the prospect of the entire UK population and beyond being confined to their houses for days on end infront of their TVs with wall to wall Premier League coverage every day. Think of the new subscriptions, advertisements and viewing figures. Of course if Sky and BT lose their business that will end up being passed on to the clubs who rely on it. Shouldn't be a problem given the amounts of cash paid out over the last 20 years but it seems nearly all of it has been spent on obscene wages and transfer fees. I do find it quite ironic. After years of criticising the Venky 'model' of being dependent on their input to underwrite massive losses every year whilst they pile millions onto the debt whilst Burnley have been celebrated as a model of what to follow. Now we are continuing to rely on Venkys managing these costs from their business and cash reserves, entirely separate to football in the UK, whilst Burnley are over the barrel of being dependent on expected income from Sky etc, which may not materialize and may send clubs depending on it to the wall. No discussion of such things in the local paper though, who are quick to mention Venky's troubles in India but still haven't carried out any analysis into Burnley's financial state if football doesn't return soon. The EFL and prized cow Championship will follow suit because they have started to go the same way as the Premier League with the ownership and money sloshing around and Sky will be eager to ensure that season is played out to a conclusion. The potential legal ramifications of not doing are severe. Only yesterday i was reading that Barnsley are contemplating legal action if they are demoted at this point and Derby/Sheffield Wednesday survive after both have been found guilty of cheating and haven't been punished (yet). What a mess it could lead to. Partly self-inflicted of course because if the EFL had thrown the book at those clubs months ago it would have been dealt with before the pandemic came along. Personally speaking I've missed it less than i thought i would do. Though subconsciously i am probably still in the mindframe of it being the summer break and it won't really hit home until September when the weather turns and there's nothing to do at the weekend. I notice that some clubs such as Everton and Man Utd have already started offering refunds to supporters for games that have been missed and i wonder how long it will be before Rovers address such things. I'm not desperate to get my £60+ or whatever it is back but i will be asking questions before deciding whether to do so.

Got to be Kappa, Asics were good though. With a couple of exceptions I've found the Umbro and Nike efforts to be quite dull. I suppose this season's grey kit at least is something different although given how often we've worn it not really worth doing. Next I'd be happy with Hummel as i love what they've done with the Coventry kits. I also like Macron efforts. I suspect we are shackled to Umbro for the forseeable.

Not sure about photos but theres a video on YouTube of it. https://youtu.be/PwaUyrvdmUI

Unless I'm being blind or stupid the only home game on sale as an individual match is this Saturday v Bristol city. Personally I'd have them all on sale now. Then again I'd try and get as many home fans in the ground as possible which doesn't seem to be on the agenda here. I suspect quite the opposite for the Leeds game.

I went on Rovers' website last night and unless you buy the 4 game bundle there are no tickets for sale for the Leeds game. It really does sum this operation up that whilst we are able to produce and send tickets to Leeds for them to sell out within an hour we can't even get ours on our website so that Rovers fans can buy if they want to go. Talk about priorities. Then Waggott will wonder why nobody bothers going. How about get tickets.on sale?

Says who? Waggott? I take what he says with a pinch of salt.

I dont understand the commercial angle to the 3rd strip. They only released it as the season was starting and only had extremely limited stock to sell. So even if it had been the most popular away shirt in history it wouldn't have sold many units.

Ok, pet hate time. I hate it when we wear an away shirt rather than our proper blue and white halves. There is no need for us to wear a changed strip at places like Middlesbrough, Charlton or Bristol City. This season we now have 3 kits, our '3rd strip' for some reason being blue with white trim and shorts and our '2nd strip' being a horrible grey. The only away game we have worn our proper kit is at Hull. We've worn the blue shirt 10 times in 20 away games, and only worn the grey shirt 9 times. Whole thing absolutely pointless. Made more silly by the fact that the blue shirt was only revealed at the 11th hour and very little stock was available for purchase. Whoever is running this needs replacing. How hard can it be. One away shirt, worn when playing away at sides with blue or white home strips. Rest of the time we use blue and white halves, like we always used to up until about 5 year ago.

Its not all about the money. Apparently we are in the play off race so why would we hand over half our ground to the opposition? We are already too generous with away crowds. Nobody else offers nearly 8000 seats to away fans. I wouldn't be surprised if Waggott had looked into it. Wouldnt be the first time home season ticket holders have been moved from their seats to accommodate large away followings. Hope those 'marginal gains' achieved by sticking 400 fans up in the gods aren't going to be missed by having 8000 Leeds behind the goal.

Forest owner got the coronavirus and was at their game v Millwall the other night....

To make matters even worse it seems the stadium and training ground are still owned by the previous owner. So now they are in a real mess with the club owning no real assets and looking set for relegation. Always had a whiff of something not right.

Burnley usually play reserve matches at Curzon Ashton. The odd part is that they've already tried having it at Morecambe and Oldham. Things get even more complicated when you consider that tonight we are playing Wolves in the knock out stages of the competition, before completing the group stage 3 days later. So if we lose tonight we are out of the competition, but then have to prepare for our final group game v the dingles. Mental.

Richard Sharpe will stick up for his mates at the club who feed him stories and make him cups of tea every Thursday pre match conference. To be turning up two games running supposedly chasing promotion with no defenders on the bench whilst our promotion winning vastly experienced former captain sits at home collecting his wage is simply inexplicable. You must be born yesterday if you think there isnt more to that particular story, sadly it seems the majority were born yesterday judging by the number who happily lap up the nonsense.

They have a good home record. But going there happy to get a point is an issue. We don't have plenty of games left. After today we are down to 9 - 27 points up for grabs. A draw today puts us on 54. We will need at least 20 points after that to get into the top 6. Two very tough home games against the top 2. Then away games to come against the relegation threatened sides and then against rivals in the pack Cardiff and Millwall. All those games will be labelled tough and folk will settle for a point in them. But it won't be enough.

Signing lots of players to replace lots of departures doesn't mean that there is a big or good or decent budget. It is filling a self created chasm with frees and loans. Trying to spend money or talking about spending money are different to actually spending money. We seem to be good at it until the money is needed.

Bottom 3 are the 3 who came up last season. Interesting.

No, we decided to sell our best players when we didn't need to, and then refused to spend any money replacing them with any quality. Try to blame players or managers but the owners were responsible. I dont agree Coyle had a decent budget. I think it was a poor budget especially given the sales and money brought in. Its exactly what Hull have done, only our collapse into League One took 12-18 months, theirs is looking like 6 months

Didn't we do exactly what Hull have done with Rhodes, Gestede and Cairney and subsequent relegation?

John Smith the Darlington season ticket holder hasn't missed a match in 30 years. John Smith the Newcastle fan is the same. Why does the latter deserve more for his efforts than the former?

Loyalty like when they were getting 15000 a week in the 80s?

Why does a Newcastle fan deserve more than a Hartlepool fan? Because he comes from a big city rather than a small town? I measure strength of support on ones loyalty, not on whether there's a lot of them

How do we ensure the media giants continue to cough up millions for the rights. Must be tough when all the early rounds consist of reserve teams and clubs not taking it seriously. Won't be much interest from lucrative overseas markets if the usual big boys aren't there playing each other. FA Cup ruined by the FA.

And once again City, United, Arsenal and Chelsea all kept apart in the quarter finals. Good for the tv companies.

I think there's more than a bit of revisionism and rose tinted outlook on life in here. Lambert wanted rid of Rhodes? Perhaps. But I think it was quite obvious at the time that the reason for that was because he was led to believe that he would be getting all or a large portion of the cash back to address other areas. Would he really have sold him if told he wouldn't get any money back? Unlikely. It was the owners failing to honour their side of things that led to Lambert walking and indirectly to Coyle arriving and relegation to League One. Graham has been great but that's beside the point. He was brought in on a 6 month loan and only after he loved it here and started scoring did he decide to move here full time when his contract expired. Hanley, Duffy and Marshall all left for rival clubs when it became clear what direction we were taking having sold our best players and appointed a joker as manager. Before that policy began clubs like Brighton and Wolves were inferior to us.