Admiral Nelsen

Straightforward selection for me. And immeasurably stronger than the team that started against Luton, let alone the one that finished it.

At least one of the wide forward spots - but ideally he'll be able to cover Rothwell's role in the centre. Not certain if he can, though I think he played centrally for Cardiff a bit.

Writing them off certainly is ridiculous. Today is more likely to be a big help to their promotion chances then hindering it. Equally, signing so many apparently first team players on January deadline day is not the sign of team who think that they only need some fine tuning. Their form has been way short of promotion standard for quite some time now (after an admittedly very impressive start, results wise) and the manager has already shown signs of not being able to get the most out the resources he has, both there & at Fulham. Deep down my money would still be on them to go up in second, but there's still a good case for them falling short. Today arguably even highlights it.

I know it sounds odd seeing as we were ultra stretched up front vs Luton, but the likelihood of being anywhere near that position again is tiny. Brereton won't be going to play for Chile again, Hedges has been brought in, Khadra and Dolan are going to be back in the next week or two. Gally might be a little longer depending on his injury, but there's no way that Butterworth gets in front of any of them and we'll be bang unlucky to have any less than 3 of them fit and ready to play at any one time until the end of the season.

Butterworth going makes sense for me. If he's ever going to useful to us, he needs to progress from the odd promising cameo and actually show that he can start games and score goals. No point staying here for 20-30 minutes here and there. Also, assuming we play the same system from here onwards, we have BBD, Khadra, Hedges, Gally and Dolan fighting for two spots upfront. Several options to play in the Buckley role too. I would've liked reinforcements, but in the absence of that it's still right to get him playing and seeing if he can progress.

Certainly looks that way, but it has serious potential to backfire. There's no guarantee that they'll be able to integrate their new signings overnight, and If Rothwell has anything about him he should be even more motivated to prove people wrong after the way his move has broken down.

Decent, yes. And I agree that there's a tendency to ignore that we've got some good business done early this window. That said, we're still one more player short of it being a really good window.

£1.5 million loan fee for Nat Phillips, apparently. Absolutely extraordinary for 6 months. It would be so funny if Bournemouth didn't go up from here.

I assumed he meant that Trav might have seen the news this morning and regretted liking the post. Happy to be corrected though if something else has gone on.

I can definitely envisage that. I think Giles and a forward of the right quality (assuming Rothwell stays) would actually be pretty good business to be honest. That would mean four players being brought in to compete for the first team - five if you include Markanday - with no genuine first teamers leaving. I know we're stretched at the moment, but it's easy to see us about a month down the line a scenario with Pickering, Brereton, Dolan, Dack, Gally, maybe Edun and Khadra all being available. All of a sudden our problem could be having too many options rather than too few, which if last season is anything to go by is not necessarily a good thing!

Liked a social media post which finished by saying 'Tell Rothwell to f*ck off'. Since been deleted though, and to be charitable most of the post was just praising Trav/Rovers, so there's a chance he liked it without reading to the end!

On paper he's a near perfect (realistic) loan signing. Can slot in at LWB which short term is a real issue for us, and then gives us loads of options elsewhere once we get a couple of troops back.

He's had a contract offer on the table for ages which is widely accepted to be a pay rise of some description. My point though is that you said that Rovers could've saved themselves this bother if we offered him a contract which recognises his value. Fine, but we don't know what we offered and what he would've accepted (or if he always intended to let his contract run anyway) so we can't be overly confident that this was a situation that we could have avoided.

Same as my last post, can we really say things like this with any certainty? Bournemouth's offer will make him a higher earner than anyone at Ewood. Our offer has clearly fallen short of that, but that doesn't mean that it as derisory or that he's been mucked about.

The trouble with statements like this is that we don't know what Rothwell's demands were, or whether he would ever have accepted an offer that we could have realistically made. Without knowing the specifics of demands and offers, it's impossible to know how much of the blame the club takes in finding themselves in this dilemma.

Very close to my views, although I'm not optimistic that that we'll find that player who will improve us overall. I definitely think that the defence carrying on as they are will be more important to getting out of this league than Rothwell would have been. I think you're right that whilst on one level this is very good business from Bournemouth, there is a risk that they're accumulating so many attacking/midfield options that it'll be a challenge to produce a system which suits them all.

It's not a perfect logic, but if we supposedly rejected Bournemouth's offers of £2million + and Mowbray's said that we've knocked back offers of around double that, then a £5-£6million fee maybe isn't that unrealistic?

I agree that he should be scoring more, but I don't think we should pretend that he's not been vital to us going forward this season. He might not register as many assists as others, but that is largely because he's contributing earlier in moves.

I know there'll be plenty who agree with that, and that it's feasible that Joe Rothwell is one of them! My view though is that is that he had chances to make the shirt his own and didn't take them in years 1 and 2. Last year he was a starter in his favoured position too. Very talented, but not productive enough until this season. Anyway, like I say it's possible that Rothwell agrees with you and that's led to him wanting out, but personally I'm looking at his behaviour at Oxford and I'm thinking that he's looking after number one.

Until this season, Rothwell hasn't played well enough, consistently enough to justify feeling messed about. We've seen that he was more than happy to run his contract down at his last club to join a club higher un the pyramid and earn more cash. All the evidence points to him just doing the same to Rovers, which notwithstanding how he's gone about asking for a move, is fair enough. Agree that given where we are now though, we should take the £6million assuming we can spend that on replacement(s).

True. Flipside of that is that there's no chance that we'll have another weekend like this with such easy games for all of our rivals, and at least we got it out of the way whilst picking up a very decent away point under the circumstances. We're still second, just need to get our troops back!

Buckley off for Ayala!

I keep reading that he's a winger - does anyone who has seen him play more have a handle on how he would be likely to fit into our system?

Me neither. On the one hand he's capable of banging them in at this level if he's remotely fit. On the other, the whole point of Ismael's style of play (supposedly) is a really aggressive press, which you'd assume is well beyond Carroll at this stage in his career.

I don't think you can ignore this season when looking at that question. Equally, it would be wrong to totally ignore the previous two (especially the run last year). I think, assuming that there is no death spiral and we miss out on the play offs, a one year rolling deal is entirely fair. If we go up he deserves the financial security of knowing he'll get some pay off if we sack him during a tough prem season, seeing as he would have made us over a hundred million or whatever it is these days. If we finish in the play offs but don't go up, he deserves another go after massively overachieving this year. I think that's fair, but also doesn't mean we'll go handing out a 3 or 4 year deal off the strength of one brilliant season.