To be fair, Garrett's only going to be 17 by the time Clarkson has gone back to Liverpool. I don't think this is going to have a particularly meaningful impact on his development. If this goes through, we'll have 6 first teamers (Travis, Rothwell, Clarkson, Johnson, Buckley and Davenport) going after three positions in our midfield. You could argue maybe 7 depending on how we play Dack when he comes back, but we're going to be using all of these players if they can stay fit.

I guess with his injury record no team would pay more than a tiny fraction of those wages. I'd be a bit surprised and disappointed if we're risking as much as 30% given our financial position, even if he is a really talented player. From City's perspective, their best option with him now is to not worry about wage contributions, and just get him playing regularly at the best level possible for a season and hope he can stay fit. If he does well, then they can offer him a new deal then maybe sell him for a few quid like they did with Tosin.

And with fit striker Jon Macken still sat on the bench! Quite an easily forgotten episode considering just how bizarre it was.

I'm pretty sympathetic to this, the only worry I have is that even if we don't sign anyone, we could end up in the position in a month or two where he's behind Lenihan, Ayala & Wharton and suddenly he's on the bench every week and not playing for weeks on end. Flip side of that is obviously that all three of those mentioned have poor fitness records, so he probably would play his fair share if he stayed at Rovers, especially if we continue switching with three at the back. I can see the logic in bringing in a cheapish prem loan and sending Carter away for another season just to make sure that he gets on the pitch.

I'm expecting improvement from Pickering, but I'm satisfied enough with what I've seen. Certainly an upgrade defensively, and let's not forget that last year was his first in L1. Very good point today, even if the performance wasn't good. After last year I'll take a few more days like today.

I know there were meant to be pretty massive engineering works taking place at Euston today - might be unrelated, but I'd bet it's had a non-trivial impact on our following. We were planning on going to the first away whoever it was, but decided against when we couldn't get train tickets a few weeks ago.

Delay due to train issues, apparently.

Believe that Graham was a Lambert/Coyle signing. Got a feeling that we're forgetting another though.

To be honest, as bad as last season was and as much as I think Mowbray should have gone, I don't think there is a debate to be had. That might change if it turns out there was something underhand in his role in the potential training ground sell-off, but without knowing much more on that front and judging them for what we can see on & off the pitch, Kean is lightyears worse than anything else we have had, including Coyle.

Pretty decent one from us around Christmas/New Year when K**n first got the job. Around 3k in bad weather if memory serves for a promising 3-1 win with 10 men. Talk about a false dawn!

Couldn't agree more with this. One of the few silver linings of the great big cloud that is the current state of the football club is that it provides the opportunity for our younger players to get more minutes on the pitch to improve and hopefully grow into valuable players for the first team. Buckley I suppose has already had his fair share of minutes, but he hasn't really had the run of starts needed to get the consistency in his game that has escaped him so far. His ability is clearly there, so I'd look to start him as much as possible until Dack comes back into the reckoning, then reassess from there. Hopefully by that time he will have properly established himself.

Millwall should prove to be a much sterner test than Swansea, they certainly won't be as self-destructive at the back. Will be interesting to see if we look to dominate the ball in this sort of fixture like we did last year, or if the Swansea game was a sign of Tony being less dogmatic when it comes to playing that way this season. Same side and shape as last week for me.

Agree - good reasons for pessimism for next season but there are plenty of other clubs in a not completely dissimilar position, and who would swap our starting XI for theirs. I'm hoping one silver lining from our situation this year is that it forces Mowbray to be 1. more consistent in his selection and 2. more pragmatic in how we play. Correcting these flaws (his biggest by some distance in my view) would make me very confident about staying up, even if the season as a whole won't be anything to write home about.

Good start to a bad season, 2-0 Rovers.

I think you're basically right, only thing I take issue with is that I think our 'floor' is a bit higher than that. Certainly agree that it's a season that's difficult to predict the league (when is the Championship not, I suppose?) and Rovers more so than most other teams. My view is that even if most of the question-marks all over our squad (which I agree with) don't come back with the answers we like, so to speak, I'd still be surprised if we aren't some way ahead of at least three clubs. It seems as though most of the Championship has gone backwards since last year, probably not the worst season to be relegated from the Prem in terms of those clubs' chances of bouncing back.

Not basing on this on last night, but I agree in that I'm confident that we won't be overly worried when it comes to going down (caveated on not having a total disaster of the rest of the transfer window). Equally, I can't see us being anywhere near the top 6 equation either, which is obviously where we all want to be. I think generally we are all (as will fans of other clubs) be slightly guilty of not really appreciating the state of plenty of other clubs at this moment in time. We're struggling, and we can only put a certain amount of that down to covid, but some other clubs are absolutely in the mire. I expect bottom half, but I doubt that there'll be much between a big clump of teams in the middle this season. I expect us to be in that conversation rather than scrapping to stay in the division.

I haven't gone back and read everyone's comments, so I could be wrong, but I haven't seen much which I'd describe as final. I wasn't able to go yesterday, so I can't judge either way, but I agree broadly that early games can be great or dreadful and don't necessarily mean much in the long run. Remember Andre Ooijer having an absolute horror show of a debut against Chelsea, and he turned out to be a really excellent player for us. Everything we've read/heard about Pickering so far means that we should stay optimistic for a good while longer I think.

He wasn't an £11 million better player. Scored fewer goals in a much better team at this level. Take your point about the contract situation though. Agree that keeping him into the last 12 months of his contract (assuming he won't re-sign) is a massive call which could backfire, but there's still plenty of time to go until the end of the window. There seem to be a healthy number of clubs sniffing round too, so I think playing a bit more hardball to get a few more million quid (or 60% of a few more million quid!) isn't overly risky at this point.

One of the very few improvements in how we conduct our business these days (to the extent that we actually conduct business at all!) is that we seem to be a lot better at keeping things under wraps than was the case a few years ago. No mean feat in this day and age.

I always live in hope for yellow & black halves, but I think this is in with a shout of being our best ever away kit. Lovely stuff.

Genuinely took me the best part of a minute to work out who you were talking about. I'm blaming the weather!

It wasn't at all blatantly obvious. There was a run in February and March that was very poor, no question, but that run was sandwiched by two four game wining streaks. Coupled with a strong first half of the season, what reason did we have at that point to think it was the bad run which was a sign of things to come, and not the other parts of the season which went well? Clearly in retrospect we would have been better off replacing him with someone better before now, but there's no point pretending that this was obvious in 2019 when it simply wasn't.

Fair enough, and sadly I think you're completely right about mid-table Championship being his ceiling (at least with a realistic squad for us to assemble given where we're at). It might've been a bit unfair of me to target that post specifically, but there are a few posts on here which I think are far too broad brush in their criticism. I guess my position is that Mowbray is in some ways a pretty competent manager at this level, but at the same time has some significant flaws which over time have become more and more apparent (last year especially). He has without doubt outstayed his usefulness and should have been replaced before now. At the same time I find it a bit frustrating that balanced assessments of his time here are far outweighed by posts making him out to be a manager without any redeeming qualities - all the more so considering we have a recent history of having managers who fit that description perfectly.

I agree that last season was unacceptably poor, and I too worry about next season, but I'm not having what you've said in the highlighted section. The idea that getting rid of a manager who had just got us promoted with 90 odd points would have been the actions of an 'ambitious club' is complete madness in my view. I think generally we're all in danger of rewriting history a little bit with his first 2 years or so. We're falling over examples which show that being a big club with a decent budget is no guarantee of promotion in that league, and our first season back had some genuinely promising spells in it. Mowbray earned his popularity at that point, as much as he has earned is unpopularity since.

I'm not sure about vast majority. I agree that the season before last marked the point when the rumblings of discontent really started, but I didn't get a sense of the average fan being against the manager until the awful run last year.