As it stands Wednesday, Millwall, QPR and Huddersfield are showing that they have the ingredients to stay up. All are picking up points at a healthy rate. All still in trouble but if they keep doing what they are will be fine. The ones sinking fast are us, Plymouth and Stoke. Birmingham struggling a bit without Mowbray but are showing fight. Could have got a point with 10 men against Southampton and got a good point at Hull last night. So I don't see them going down. Thing is that Plymouth have a good solid home record and will win games there against the poorer sides. So not sure about them Think we are destined for the drop, only positive at the moment is we aren't losing every week and are getting a few draws but those could well cost us as they did under Mowbray when draws against Wolves and Bristol were celebrated and then we were relegated.

Disagree the Wednesday owner is worse than Venkys. A loose cannon yes, but I don't think anyone is as awful as Venkys and that includes the Reading owner. They really are despicable.

Nobody. They'd buy West Brom, Birmingham, Forest, Hull, Leeds, Barnsley, Huddersfield, Bolton, Portsmouth, Bournemouth, Charlton, Ipswich, Sunderland, Sheff Wed, Coventry, Wolves But not Rovers Definitely not.

We score first and I'm fairly confident we win. They score first and I'm fairly confident they win.

A post transfer window interview at the end of March, for a window that closed at the end of January and with the end of the campaign 6-7 weeks away? Hardly any point is there? I'm not sure there's anything that Broughton can or will say that will make an ounce of difference now.

Doubt it. The owners clearly don't care about league status, if they did they'd have made an ounce of effort in January 2023 and 2024 to get us promoted. If they cared then at least one or more of Waggott, Broughton and Silvester would have been down the road long ago, fired for their involvement in the January fiascos (assuming they were responsible and not merely making excuses for the owners). If / when we end up back in League One the only concern of the owners will be how much cash they need to pump in and whether that is acceptable to their current line of thinking / situation. If so they'll let the show roll on for longer, if not they will make further cuts and sales. They don't fire people they like. Waggott, like Mowbray, established the personal link with his jollies to India and thus is in place as long as he wants to be.

Well he's already got rid of Fan Consultation Meetings (mandated by the League) and shareholder meetings (held for decades prior to his arrival) so it might not be long before he knocks the Fans Forum on the head with some more claptrap excuses.

Agree though I suspect there is some sort of wage saving going on. Suspect Fleck is on much much less than he was at Sheff Utd, a kind of short term audition / shop window for the summer exercise. But yeah, a ridiculous move that most of us could see was insane and so it has proven to be. I really just think they make it up from day to day. Week to week. Ipswich came in with an offer to pay Travis until the summer. The pound signs flashed and the deal was done with amazingly no administrative issues. They might have got away with it had Palace not come in for Adam or Tronstad got injured, but that's playing roulette with our future and was never likely to happen. So when Adam is on his way they realise we're in a mess in midfield and have to act quickly. Of course it's the loan and short term frees market and Fleck arrives, just a hope and prayer that he gets fit and stays so.

Fleck was a desperation stage gamble that ticked all the boxes for all the parties Sheff Utd got shut and off their books and squad early. Fleck got a shot at earning a longer deal here or impressing suffiently to attract interest from elsewhere. Rovers got a quick fix at favourable cost to address a problem of their own making. Unfortunately for us the risk was all on Rovers, because someone with his recent fitness record was always at risk of issues and so it has proven. But when you operate like this club has operated you get what you deserve. We wouldn't have needed Fleck if we hadn't taken the unprecedented step of loaning our captain (excellent fitness record) out in the first few days of the window But when you are more interested in cutting costs than winning games these are the sort of decisions you get. We are now going to probably lose Championship status and all that goes with it as a result of such short-sightedness

I think (hope) Waggott will be sh1tting himself right now. The 7 years of relative plain sailing mid-table security now in real jeopardy. I suspect another relegation to the third division and £7 million+ straight off the revenue streams next season is the only development that might turn the heat up on him and his invisible friend. He'll be battening down the hatches and hoping the storm blows over. If it does happy days, he can plan for a well orchestrated in house interview in May, collect his bonus and look forward to another year of whatever it is he does. If things don't work out the anger is only going to increase and rightly or wrongly he is the one in the crosshairs with those fans who are becoming more and more vocal and angry with the way things are going here. So I suspect it will be radio silence from him, cowardly as it is, until our fate is sealed.

If we go down he doesn't deserve to be here next season. But he will be because they won't pay 2 years up on his deal. To be fair as ambivalent as I am on Eustace I doubt this operation in League One would have any prospect of getting anyone better. None of it really matters though because the overall trajectory and destination of the club is a downward one and that is set by the owners. Eustace, JDT, Pep, Jose, John Coleman, they're all going to have the same issues and scumbags dragging us down.

Players in poor sides raise their game in the big no pressure no expectation situations. Kean managed to lead us to impressive performances and results at Anfield and Old Trafford when nobody gave us a chance. Berg took us to a win at Arsenal in the Cup where nobody expected us to. Coyle nearly knocked out Mourinho's United whilst we were bottom of this league. I'd read very little into the performance and result against Newcastle. It was enjoyable on the night but of little to no relevance to our league campaign. We're a soft weak side that crumbles under pressure and can't cope with expectation. Easy raising your game and giving it 100% when live on national TV against a Premier League side and you simply have to give it your best shot. Harder to travel to Championship outposts and grind out wins against seasoned battlers. That takes bottle.

'A must win game' So what happens if we don't win? Nothing, we just say that Plymouth is then a must win and on it goes. I know which side between Rovers and Millwall I'd put my money on in a relegation scrap.

We can but hope. I think sensible people would long ago have taken proactive steps to get rid of the club knowing the situation they were facing. The fact they have done nothing but force us to sell more assets tells us they really don't give a stuff about the best future for the club or doing anything to mitigate the damage to it, it's more important they keep hold for no purpose and drag the club into the gutter whilst doing so.

It's been slowly dying for years, left to rot and wither. What we have now is the later stages of the decay.

Mowbray, for all his faults, crucially agreed to jump on a plane to India within a few weeks of the season ended and had a meeting with Madame. The rest is history. Once he got that personal link to them and talked the talk they loved him and agreed to his requests. That is why he got relatively healthy financial backing during his time in charge where others didn't. It is also why he was unsackable and left alone to run his contract down. You never know, maybe Eustace will be invited over in May where JDT wasn't but I doubt it, so instead we just have the underlings cutting costs and ticking their target boxes.

2 wins in 17 and the cause of that set of results is what will doom us, not QPR winning at Leicester. If you don't get to 50 points you have no right to expect survival. If you get there and still go down, as we did last time, then you can claim an element of misfortune.

I'd be more worried about the situation if I had any ounce of belief in things changing and getting better once this season was out of the way. But it isn't, at best next season will be another relegation battle. And it will keep on being until we finally go down. At best the Indian restrictions get lifted and we go back to business as usual. Which still means budget cuts, excuses, incompetence and sales of best players. None of those things are created by the Indian funding restrctions, they were happening before. So I'm not worrying, relegation is inevitable, and dare I say totally deserved. It is only a question of when and what happens after that we need bother with.

Two types of manager in the world. Those who are willing to play the Venky game and those who aren't. JDT and Lambert weren't. Realised they'd been conned, just like the rest of us, and knew for the sake of their sanity they needed to get out of it quickly. The rest were just grateful to have a job here and put up with it.

Fleck will have been a deadline day panic after selling Adam and realising that offloading Travis was insane. So they'll have looked around for easy deals to do, in this case a bloke never playing at Sheffield Utd and out of contract soon, ticks a lot of boxes. Happy to come here until the summer to try and get game time and match fit, no obligations beyond that, effectively a loan which is the way they like it here. Everyone happy. Sheff Utd get rid of a wage and place in the squad allowing them to put money elsewhere. He gets an audition here and much better prospects of game time and we appear to plug a self inflicted hole in the squad until the summer. Suspect we aren't paying his full wage, probably he's done a deal with Sheffield to go early. Takes a lump sum pay off and we pay him the shortfall.

I use turnstiles L and arrived at 7:30pm just as they announced kick off had been delayed. It was chaos and no way would all the home fans have got through the turnstiles in time for 7:45pm. To make matters worse one of the three turnstiles was closed, but then bizarrely opened at about 7:50pm which of course allowed people to get in much more quickly.

I just think the ground looks awful looking at the BBE and having the upper tier shut. Visually it would look so much better if open, even with only 500-1000 up there at least it would appear better. Their incredibly limited efforts at putting people up there via the free tickets to a few schools in Blackburn appear to have ended and they now get put downstairs in the family stand. With cutback Steve and vile Venkys going nowhere I wonder how long it will be before that area is opened to general admission fans.

Neither were sellouts. Oxford only filled about half the DE upper so over 1500 empty up there and then the lower tier wasn't completely full, nor were the top corners of the BBE. For some reason we never fill the full capacity of the DE these days whereas back in the 90s I'm sure they got an extra 300-400 in there. Against Newcastle there were chunks of seats in the bottom corners empty.

I don't understand where 2000 empty seats were in the Jack Walker stand. From the seat planner and TV there were perhaps a couple of hundred in the bottom corner of the family stand and upper top corner, then the small block nearest the Darwen End. That is 14 rows of about 10-12 seats, maybe 150 total. So unless there were 1500 empty seats in the directors box I'd be surprised with that. BBE lower was virtually full. A sprinkling of single seats here and there, can't imagine any less than 4900 in there. The number announced was about 2000 short of what I'd expected. But yeah, sums up the operation when with a 2/3 full ground they can't cope and have to delay kick off.

I can think of a quick guaranteed way to save £6,000 a week and it involves getting rid of the CEO. Then however much the shadow man is on as well.