JHRover

1. We lost Dack before Xmas and knew full well he was out for the rest of the season at the very least. Do you really think that if any of those other clubs had lost their talisman and main attacking threat at that early stage that they wouldn't have used the January window to replace him or at least tried damn hard to? We sat back and did nothing so don't complain about his absence. It was unfortunate but we had the chance to address it and refused to do so. Imagine if we had been 2nd or 3rd when he got injured and we had done nothing. It could easily have cost us automatic promotion. You have to add from positions of strength and go for it, not just play the victim, shrug shoulders and go again next year. 2. Not interested in long balls, tempo or passing statistics. Meaningless just like possession figures. Don't give away cheap soft goals and take your chances when they come. We aren't good at either because we've not addressed those positions properly. We were, in my opinion, pretty awful and very ineffective most of the night. Millwall defended expertly and allowed us to aimlessly pass the ball around with no penetration or goal threat. A familiar story. 3. So we never sack Mowbray because the scouting network requires his continuing presence? We have to rip it up and start again if someone new takes over? Are we a bunch of amateurs here or what? Whilst improvements and investments are welcome there is no evidence whatsoever beside Mowbray's claims that it is actually delivering anything and we've already got the new excuses lined up for this summer. 4. To my knowledge no side assembled the spine of their squad using loans. We are in a worse position because at the end of last season we had Raya under contract and hadn't used up another £5 million on Gallagher. We also have since used up another year without one of our own players bedding into Central defence alongside Lenihan and will have half a defence to rebuild.

Hull v Luton this week. Both sides need a win and if they fail then both will probably go down. Luton have ideal fixtures with us, Hull and QPR last 3. All 3 will be on the beach. Birmingham now safe with that late point. Probable relegation contenders next season unless they appoint a good manager.

Travis for me. Armstrong goal of the season.

After Saturday we will have 0 season ticket holders. Easy to accommodate then.

Only a matter of time before a club, probably in the Championship, comes in with a cheeky bid for Nyambe, probably encouraged by his agent. Why not when he is missing out to a mediocre midfielder. With his physique alone he is worth a punt. Rovers will then see the pound signs and in the absence of any direction or communication from India will be persuaded to sell him for a relatively low fee and he will quickly exit stage left with minimal fanfare. That money will be needed by Waggott to keep things ticking over. Mowbray won't be bothered as he clearly isn't a Nyambe fan and it will open up RB to boy wonder for next season. The PR machine will have to go into overdrive though. Selling a promising and popular young player to a rival needs dressing up so expect a Ben Marshall style campaign. First it will be talk about him having his head turned by others, then it will be him refusing to sign a new deal, then it will be Mowbray deciding to sell so to reinvest the proceeds into better signings. None of which will actually be true or happen, but it is the old stunt of shift blame and responsibility away from Ewood and onto the departed player. Next news is we will have idiots at Ewood booing him (Tom Cairney) believing he sought a move away and people on the Internet saying that we had no choice because he wanted out. They think we are all stupid but I and many others have come to learn how they operate and how this works.

So Luton have Hull away and Rovers at home to play. Two ideal fixtures in their battle to survive.

7 weeks maximum until kick off for the new season. No season tickets or memberships on sale. No new kits or sponsors. No budget or discussions on next season. No new contracts discussed. Why do we bother?

The club needs to sell them to be able to buy one. We could have 20,000 folk queuing down Nuttall St for a season ticket for next year and they wouldn't take the money. Idiots.

Well that was dreadful, but predictable. It's a bad sign when Millwall are what i want us to be - organised, resolute, not pretty but dogged, every man knows his job and a manager with a plan who follows it and it works and who doesnt spend his days banging on about nice football, possession stats or individual development. Oh and still in with a play off chance despite spending nothing on project signings. The second they went 1-0 up i had absolutely no belief or expectation that we would get back into it. They expertly saw the game through to its inevitable conclusion and for all the jargon about possession etc. the reality is that other than the last minute chance we had next no nothing infront of goal and could play until Saturday without scoring. The sign of a good defence and millions wasted in attack. To have the likes of Brereton, Gallagher and Chapman earning god knows what thanks to this manager is shocking. What a weary end to the season. Many pointing to progress but even that isn't guaranteed. Assuming we get at least 1 point from the 6 remaining then we will have beat last season's total and we should finish higher in the table but at that sort of rate it will take 5 years to get to the play offs. Is that really good enough? Compare to the job Rowett has done in 8 months at Millwall with no cash? For me Mowbray has run his course. We seem no nearer any identity, style or finished article than the day we got promoted more than 2 years ago. He's a confused man, an idealist, a dreamer who thinks football is about being nice and pretty and having lots of possession when really the best managers adapt their approaches to the circumstances and work with what they have. Very similar criticisms went his way at all his previous clubs. A good man and a competent manager yet but enough in his locker to get the club to the next level? No.

I will be going back to games as soon as I am able, although I understand why those with health issues or more elderly wouldn't want to risk it. But I'm not desperate for it to happen, I'll wait and go when able but I'm not counting the days go by. But I'm keen and haven't got much else to do in my spare time other than Rovers so that's fine. Others who have less of an interest won't be as willing. I'm with you though - I won't take kindly to being told to jump through hoops and other measures. I expect we are facing up to a collapse in attendances the likes of which we haven't seen before. The club needs to be 100% on the ball in the coming weeks and months to retain as many as possible, tie folk down to the club and not let people drift away never to return. The best way to achieve this is to get season tickets on sale ASAP with incentives to buy now, hand over your money and get people fastened in for when they can return. Simply shrugging shoulders, blaming circumstances and allowing months to pass by where people find other things to do and spend their money on is a recipe for disaster. I could accept the delay if Waggott was busy plotting some radical groundbreaking new scheme but we know more or less what prices will be and it is very unlikely that much will change on last year's offerings. If he doesn't have the authority to decide prices even in unique conditions like these then is he really worthy of the title he has and the salary he gets?

Worrying about excluding people isn't a problem likely to impact us. With a season ticket base of 8000 in a 31000 stadium we could probably accommodate everyone no problem especially if families and couples sit together. Even then I'd wager a large percentage of those 8000 wouldn't want to go due to feeling at risk or simply can't be bothered with the hassle of it all. Not that getting people into the ground or paying their money is something that the owners or Waggott seem particularly interested in or bothered about judging by the silence on tickets.

Well done to Wycombe. Will be an interesting addition to the Championship and far more enjoyable than a Sunderland, Ipswich or Portsmouth coming up. Expect Ainsworth will discover his budget before Mowbray does and can get cracking on transfers which is outrageous.

The land around Ewood could be put to much better use although if we did get promoted those car parks could be both a blessing and money spinner. Building on it all could cause problems down the line. The 4g facility that the Community Trust went on about doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. I'm sure Euro garages would be keen if we were preparing to sell one of the car parks for development. Getting Venkys to approve season ticket prices and budgets is hard enough. Getting them to approve major facility improvements? Not going to happen. Will sit in someone's pigeon hole for 12 months until it gets forgotten about.

Norwich and Burnley don't have billionaire owners. Far from it they are paupers in football terms and can't afford to gamble. We do.

What we will or won't do this summer will have diddly squat to do with FFP rules. It will be to do with the whim of Venkys who change their minds with regularity and quite clearly aren't following a well laid out multi year plan. If they were then Mowbray would know where he stood by now. What City have done is immaterial as those are UEFA rules. The ones we have are Football League rules. Completely different although the aim is the same - ensure the 'big' clubs aren't threatened. We need to look at what guilty clubs have done - Aston Villa, QPR, Bournemouth, Brighton, Leicester, Birmingham, Reading, Derby, Sheffield Wednesday. Nothing to see here folks. Waggott will try to shield his bosses and it is unfortunate that they have a ready made excuse all set to go to print as soon as a sale or two happens. So many of the fan base have been indoctrinated with Ffp fear over the last 3 years that they will accept sales and a lack of investment as inevitable and even good if it enables us to comply with rules that others haven't bothered with. Waggott and Venkys happy as it gets them off the hook and reduces stick they get and the peasants can go back to being eternally grateful to India for keeping the lights on. In the end I'm fully expecting a horrific summer including a couple of significant asset departures, no reinvestment and lack of adequate incomings. This isn't what was on the tin after promotion. This will likely result in a long hard relegation slog next season. Mowbray and Waggott are expecting this and are priming the fan base for it with their interviews. The fact Waggott can't even get tickets or shirts on sale by mid July tells me all I need to know. Mowbray will get on with it, expectations lowered and focus on keeping the group intact and minimise the turnover in players. Waggott as the mouthpiece will tell everyone it is essential even though most other clubs won't do it.

Not this again. She's going out with a professional footballer. Moving around the country between clubs is part of the lifestyle. If he's not prepared to do that then his career isn't going to go very far. We are a few hours drive away, with Manchester and Cheshire on the doorstep, not Eastern Ukraine or Siberia. The reason we didn't get him back was because we tried doing it on the cheap.again, waiting until the 11th hour hoping Southampton would agree to send him here on loan with heavily subsidised wages just so he could have regular football. Then we were priced out by Fulham, which probably didn't take much doing. If we had been serious about bringing him back we would have sent the Gallagher cheque to Southampton but for Reed instead. They would have accepted it and then Reed would have had a decision to make. Float around various loans for the next few years or put down some roots and play every week. You reckon if Everton or City had offered him a deal he would have turned it down because his girlfriend didn't fancy living in those areas?

Rovers and Bowyer didn't invest in defenders either, nor did Rovers and Lambert or Rovers and Coyle. Strange. One consistent? Those who control the purse strings. All conspiracy theories of course.

West Brom appointed a top drawer manager, paid the necessary and let him get on with the job. It isn't rocket science. When we came down we mucked around with Kean, Berg and Appleton before Bowyer got the job by default. If we'd have got a top manager in 2012 I'm confident we would have been back up.

I agree that a museum from a commercial viewpoint probably wouldn't be viable. But it could be done on non commercial lines. You don't need to open it up 9-5 every day of the week. Just open it on matchdays for a few hours before the game. Free entry to ticket holders, put displays up on our history, memorabilia from days gone by, shirts etc. I'm sure many Rovers fans would be happy to donate their stuff if it was looked after. Just move one of the club staff to the door to check tickets and the job is a Good one. Just another idea to generate interest, give people a reason to go to the ground, learn about the club, the club could use it to collect and store its history (I get the impression that the club has made no efforts to gather its memorabilia and I suspect Birdy has a bigger collection in his house). Wolves have managed it. A huge part of their marketing is promoting their 50s glory days and they have a museum and cafe. There always seems to be a can't do rather than a can do attitude around the club.

Hmmmm. Are you saying Blackburn is a small North West town or that Blackburn Rovers is a small North West town club? Either way, I'm not sure either is accurate. I certainly wouldn't describe Rovers as a small club and whilst we are constrained by heavy competition and a relatively small catchment area I'm not sure I'd agree even that Blackburn is a small town. The conurbation has around 150,000 people plus many more just outside it so we are not an Accrington or Morecambe here. The reason we have a 31,000 capacity and not 20-25,000 like our neighbours is because our ground was built for us to be the best in the country, and not for us to be mediocre like Preston, Wigan and Burnley have been. At the time it was built i think 30,000 was a sensible capacity for where we were. If JW had built it to 25,000 he may have been locking people out. Its too big now for where we are. The way to overcome that issue is to get promoted and grow the fan base. Sadly that sounds like.too much hard work for the Waggots of the world. I agree the Riverside needs work doing to it soon. It looks a mess, the facilities are letting the club and stadium down. To not even have every seat under cover and have no concourse is really poor. It doesn't help that when it was done in the 80s it was on the cheap and wasn't a complete newbuild. I wouldn't waste my time with a 'refurb'. I don't think it could be done to a good enough standard to make it worthwhile and with this setup would probably end up worse than it is now. With this lot we'd probably throw up a prefab thing like they have at Accrington. The last thing we need is it doing on the cheap as a patch up job. It needs completely rebuilding in line with modern specs to include internal space, concourses, disabled access, floodlights, the works. Might not be cheap but there are ways to get it done. Preston managed it with their pavilion not long ago.

We don't know what league we are going to be in

I think Dave Whelan's original plan after taking over Wigan Athletic was to buy Central Park from the Rugby club and refurbish/rebuild it into a modern ground for both football and rugby. He entered into discussions with the rugby club owner but in the end he accepted a higher offer from Tesco, so Whelan went off and built the JJB on spare land instead. When you are outside the main stand at Wigan that is obviously modelled on the Jack Walker stand with the glass and brick. As are the Centennial stand at Anfield and Park end at Goodison which were both built in the 90s. The rest of the DW/JJB is basic and functional. Better than many new grounds as it has 4 separate single tiered stands which are quite steep and close together which helps the atmosphere. Also still reasonably located in reach of the town centre rather than miles away.

What a hammering for Stoke. They, along with Huddersfield, Boro and Hull look like getting out of jail with Wigan's points deduction.

Birmingham owners are in the football manager mindset. Not happy with what they had in Rowett pushing for the top 6, tried to be clever and have got nowhere. Exactly what I spend my time warning against here. Keep it simple and focus on results.

Isn't Rob Kelly not still working with Rosler at Fortuna Dusseldorf? Why would he leave them to be assistant manager at Barrow?!