JHRover

And probably before / afterwards head off for a few days at home in Kent. Suspect there will be gravy train requests galore going in for this one.

The two clubs must mutually agree ticket prices in advance. So fear not, I'm sure 'man of the people' Waggott will be doing his bit to keep prices down to a level in keeping with what he has been charging at Ewood.

And how about the non-existent attempts to cash in on Brereton mania? I mean how often does a Championship club have something like that drop into its lap? An incredible story which culminated in him playing regularly for Chile, developing a massive fanbase out there and even landing sponsorship deals with Pepsi etc. Yet the sum total of Rovers' involvement was to put a couple of t-shirts on sale in the shop. Even when a glorious opportunity to market and promote the club comes along no effort was made. Any effort is just too much effort with this lot. There's no way they'll do anything that incurs cost or risks incurring cost and unfortunately for them in this business if you want to succeed you have to be prepared to take a risk. This lot aren't prepared to. They just want steady away all the time going nowhere.

After recent away games at Watford, Plymouth and Ipswich, and with long trips to QPR, Millwall and Norwich all in the next month or so, the addition of Chelsea to the fixture list is really going to test the fans.

Waggott cracking open a bottle or two tonight. Successful in his plot to shut down the BBE and boost his figures with the owners, barely a murmur of discontent, he now gets to cash in on JDT and the team overcoming his stunt by steering us to a lucrative tie at Chelsea. He's a parasite.

And remember crucially their decline and rot stopped and the turnaround began when Marcus Evans cleared off and handed the club over, debt free, to new people.

So heading into our third round game tomorrow we've got no website, can't receive emails, can't sell tickets unless people ring the understaffed ticket office and have shut our home end to supporters. Trailblazers indeed.

If I give them the benefit of the doubt and believe the website breakdown is innocent and unrelated to the ticket scandal there is a big problem with the club's Internet and website. How many times do we see technical issues and problems?

If we were in a more affluent area I could see it, but I'm not sure there is that much value in Ewood and Ewood Park for it to be worth flogging. The training ground absolutely, no surprises that Waggott had his hot sticky eyes on that piece of real estate within no time of his arrival. He'd absolutely love to get that land off the books and condense it all onto the playing fields behind St Marys' College or somewhere like that. Instead they'll just let Ewood fall to rack and ruin and gradually mothball more and more of it until we are just left with the BBE lower and JW stand on matchdays. They've had this in mind for some time IMO and the awkward part is that 1500 or so Riversiders haven't succumbed to the temptation to switch to the JW stand.....yet.

What bothers me is the ease with which they try to explain that the expected numbers are going to be low. Not an ounce of concern expressed or embarassment at selling such a pitiful number of tickets, no indication of any intention to do something over the course of the last week to bump up that number, just a shrug of the shoulders and a shut home stand. I can't believe that Waggott will have the brass neck to turn up and watch but I bet he does. He won't miss many of the complimentaries and rubbing shoulders with opposition directors. And this for me is the most difficult part of Venky ownership to stomach, not only that they are undermining the club and team by making these sort of decisions, unprecedented as they are, but also that a reptile like Waggott will be sat upstairs in the free comfy seats surveying all before him, benefiting from the decision as he gets ready to send the spreadsheets to India for his bonus review, laughing at us without a care in the world. When did he last pay to watch a football match?

Totally agree. I think the owners were persuaded to employ Waggott on the basis he would pay for himself by cutting their input. I strongly suspect he is paid or bonuses are paid on what he saves. He'll stop at nothing and has no shame in doing it.

I think what you mean is when we see Wharton next summer the club will claim that the majority of that will go towards ensuring that we are FFP compliant. But remember, just because shysters employed by Venkys say something is true, doesn't make it so, no matter how many times Elliot Jackson prints it in his newspaper.

When you make zero attempt or effort to market or develop the club outside the confines of BWD (even though it is a fact that a substantial portion of our support base lives outside BWD) then nobody associated with the Club can complain about attendances. Make an effort - advertise, promote, transport - then you have the right to use numbers through the turnstiles as an excuse if they are low.

Isn't that about 5-6 draws in a row for Coventry now? Not looking forward to our game there next week. Think we can predict what happens there.

This is where selling a player or two at the right time and then reinvesting that money wisely comes in. It is the Brentford model. Unfortunately we are run by liars and charlatans who have no intention of doing anything of the sort. People who make it up on a whim, slash budgets overnight during transfer windows, who allow £30 million of assets to walk for nothing because they can't be arsed dealing with new contracts.

Maybe 'W4gg0tt' could spend Wednesday evening in his office rather than on his arse in the free prawn sandwich area and try to work out how / why we are looking like having the same or less on Ewood for a 3rd round game v Championship opposition as we got in the 1st round v League Two opposition, after a brilliant 8-0 win in the 2nd round. You would, of course, expect numbers to at the very least hold steady if not increase substantially, yet according to their own figures we are currently well short and the tone of their email seems to suggest they aren't expecting many more. Of course if we get less than 7000 rather than seize the opportunity with seeming relish to shut down a home section and save a few quid on paying less stewards and catering staff the appropriate response would be for the head of the organisation to investigate how and why the hell we seem to be going backwards on numbers despite advancing in the competition. Maybe, just maybe, the answer to that lies in his policies and schemes. Some recognition and acceptance of that would be nice., followed quickly by his resignation as once again his desperate bid to save a few quid in the short term has backfired and cost the club more in the longer term.

Muddled thinking is their speciality. I completely agree in this part. It is why I am rapidly losing patience with things. I feel that from every angle there is a piss taking culture in football. Rovers are at it all the time but also Sky, EFL, officials do it. Taking the loyal paying fans for granted all the time.

The 'broadcast footage' reference I think is important. I believe the 'powers that be' down there attach great importance to how the ground looks on TV. I've no doubt this was the motivation behind them moving the TV gantry to the Riverside, moving the family stand downstairs to the JW lower, shutting the upper tiers and increasing Riverside prices to make it less financially desirable to sit in there. Why, we can only speculate, but it seems someone wants to project an image to those watching on tv. As you say, that motive kind of falls by the wayside when you are then shutting the BBE. To finish off with 'should we progress further in the competition, as we hope to do' I find insulting. They don't care about progression in the cup and never have done. This sort of decision proves it.

Bournemouth, Fulham and Forest all went up the year before and all three survived last season. I would bet at least two and probably all three stay up again this season too.

Seems odd to me that the CEO of Rovers would have an email address in which letters are substituted for numbers. If nothing else it looks totally unprofessional.

Meite, Ramsey, Grant, Bowler Also experience signed from abroad

Cardiff turned a bit of a corner now and on a good little run. Amazing what happens when you invest and sign some proven quality.

Its a losing battle. Unlike most other clubs that have been run into the ground by negligent / dodgy owners, where the fanbases of those clubs were united in wanting rid of the orchestrators of their misery (Blackpool, Portsmouth, Coventry, Birmingham, Newcastle etc. etc.) here we have the opposite effect. What we have at Rovers is an extreme case of stockholm syndrome / indifference. It seems to me judging by the people I sit near and the comments online that the fanbase is predominantly made up either of people who think Venkys are either good or at the very least indispensable and then a large number who simply don't know or care about what happens at ownership or board level. It is a fascinating situation in many ways, it seems purely through the passage of time and payment of bills they have attained respect / gratitude / appreciation from the majority. That's the losing battle part because if that is all it takes to overcome and make up for everything they have done and continue to do as owners then there is no hope. It is almost beyond belief that we are now roughly 8 years on from when the shadow man started effectively running the club on behalf of the owners in which time there has been no interview, no forum, no investigation of him or his background by media, a couple of photographs and minor references on official media. This might be of no importance to some but it is important to me. I long since concluded there is no hope on this front with such a large number of people signed up to the Venky appreciation society. So the only way of dealing with this is to reduce my financial and emotional investment in this because ultimately it is doing me no good at all to carry on. Every week I find myself getting very angry at fellow supporters. Reading comments after the game blaming JDT for the state we are in yet not a single mention of the real problem at the club and the second the subject moves to the owners they are 'off limits' as far as criticism goes. People quite happy to spend their days lambasting JDT and the players for in game failings but completely unwilling to discuss or criticise the architects upstairs.

Of course we shouldn't be daunted by playing Ipswich or Coventry. A side fresh out of League One and a side winless in 5. But playing the way we are particularly defensively we are going to face problems. A lot of it comes down to experience and know-how. Starting games at this level with teenagers across the pitch and having kids on the bench to turn to when struggling it is a big problem. One that was warned about but in the fervour to 'give the academy lads a chance' has been overlooked.

Clearly the way to do this, if cost cutting is the primary concern, would be to stick the Cardiff fans in one side of the JW lower tier, close the Darwen End, let home fans have the rest of the JW stand and the BBE. This is something I could understand even though my season ticket seat is in the area likely to be allocated to away fans. Opening even a quarter of the DE for the sake of 300 or so away fans would be daft from a financial and logistical point of view. But even if the gate is a poor one there will certainly be more home fans wanting to go in the BBE than there will Cardiff fans coming. So surely the numbers say shut the DE first. Trouble is the only language people like Waggott understand is that which ruffles their own feathers. He's got away with everything in his time at Rovers because there has been barely any scrutiny or discontent. He has only to deal with a handful of supporters at the forum meetings and friendly in-house / local media. I bet he can't believe how easy it is to do these things and get away with it.