Sensational work

I just had this conversation on the phone. I’m interested/intrigued but I kind of don’t give a shit? The season feels over, I don’t know who’s staying beyond the end of the season and the manager has had an… inauspicious start, let’s say. Difficult to get bothered over.

Same, but that most recent replay raises doubts. Not convinced either way, it’s very close.

This is better. Balls going into the box, bit of purpose and urgency. Happier with this showing. Poor start has set us back, but something to build on.

Good header, poor defending from Cardiff. Why is Dennis losing his rag after making an assist?

Basically silent. Even the Cardiff fans are quiet.

It’s a 4-2-3-1 with Ohashi in the ten and everyone else where you’d think they’d play.

Cardiff will be pleased with the goal, good cross and header. I involuntarily let out a “goal” as it met his head and a laugh when it beat Pears. maybe this is all some kind of elaborate practical joke that I haven’t worked out yet.

VI interview is a weird car crash to get yourself into but he has fully pranged it. Pointedly mentioned that this season was about continuing in the same vein, when he came in. He has radically shifted the way we play and we look shit, but now says he needs time to implement his style of play. He’s taken over a team in the playoffs, as we all know and as we all saw. He cannot get away with this interview, he needs to catch a lot of shit for it. Disaster appointment, shy of there being millions to spend or a raft of contract renewals and even then, I suspect this guy has one style of playing that has fallen out of fashion. Too many aspirational Pep Guardiolas out there’s, when the future is about tactical flexibility.

I would love to see protests, would love to see direct action in the stadium, outside the stadium, etc. it won’t happen, because we had some dedicated and talented people trying to make that happen and happy clapper fans used to give them stick for it. So we played that card and those who organised have justifiably decided the effort wasn’t worth the hassle from the happy clappers. The unavoidable truth is that the owners will not willingly let go of the club. They won’t return the calls of people who have enquired about buying the club. They’re the particular brand of inherited wealth that are purely ego-driven. The only route out of their ownership is administration. The one thing the self-serving parasites in the directors’ box won’t risk is personal inconvenience and that includes jail time. Running a company that’s insolvent will land you there. Administration would wrestle control from the owners and a buyer would be found. Yeah, you’re running the risk of “out of the frying pan and into the fire” but we’ve been in the frying pan for so long that we’re a husk. I’d rather take my chances that we bounce luckily away from the fire. ”Not a penny more” for me, but it needs to be concerted, organised and with a motivation. An education for the fans that think it’s more important to turn up than stand up, an outreach program to turn opinion against the owners, so that it can be beyond doubt that any financial backing from the terraces is over. If you’ve got a season ticket - go. Don’t buy anything, protest and shout, back the team, but not a penny through the till. And don’t fucking renew, for God’s sake. The renewals this season were plain to see in the accounts for the year. £150k in pension contributions and £350k in salary to one Steve Waggott. So many all-inclusive cruises, so little time.

If the extent of WATR’s contact with the executive team of the football club is anything other than breaking their noses every time they see them, then I don’t understand what they’re trying to achieve. ”Get your bosses to sell the club” ”No, I am so shit at this job that there is nowhere else that would employ me. Can you help me get my bonus next year?” *WATR becoming Steven Gerrard in a post-match interview for a second* ”Yeah, ‘course.”

It’s almost as though this guy has a reputation for falling out with players and managing himself out of a job within 12 months…

Said we had big chances, Stoke didn’t and that our players needed more belief, temporarily forgetting that he’s in charge of team talks, tactics, training and picking the team, which would be all the points at which you instil belief

If any of you want to dissociate from your minds and bodies, without the financial and toxicological implications of a rhinoceros-level dose of ketamine, check out Ismael’s interview with Sky, the psychedelic properties of his bullshit are potent.

One letter away from nominative determinism, with this post

Waggott’s pension contributions were the priority.

What a keeper that Johansson is, massive paw on that.

He’s rattled despite being one up against his previous club. Should be strolling about the place having a whale of a time.

I would almost prefer it if we didn’t score, which is new territory for me. I almost cannot handle the hope that a goal would bring.

We are so shit it is genuinely unbelievable. I am struggling to believe that this team gets paid to do this every day and this is the best they’ve been able to come up with.

The manager has contributed fuck all this half except the subs and even then didn’t seem to understand why he was making them.

Reckon he’d love a stint at LAFC, Hollywood probably very attractive to him.

Excellent reference. Thing is - I still fall for this, because when he just does the basics and focuses and works hard, he’s good. He’s got something. When he loses focus, starts trying to be The Big I Am and The Main Man, he can’t compute. His reflex to take the game to the opposition is to do all sorts of tricks and - much to our chagrin - he pulls of one in five to a high enough level that it confirms in his mind that he needs to keep trying it, while entirely forgetting that he fails with it 80+% of the time. We are losing to a squad of former Rovers players that weren’t deemed a sufficient standard to hold down a regular first team place, which I think has to be perfect comic irony.

I buckled. I said I wouldn’t watch. I also said I’d not be drinking at home. For obvious reasons, that resolution has been shattered. It is insane - utterly insane - that we can give any credence to the theory that the club is being intentionally sabotaged by its own executive team. But the thing is - what else is it? Maybe there’s a mentality issue at Brockhall, that seems to be inherited by every player that passes through its doors. We’ve been down here for 13 years or so and not been in the playoffs once. We are being intentionally defunded, pointedly, even. The CEO is giving himself a bumper pay rise despite having achieved physically nothing of note. Having improved absolutely nothing about the club. Even the infrastructural expenditure has been about maintenance. Our sponsors are a regional solicitors’ firm with an annual turnover of half the club’s. They were graduated from the back of shirt sponsor. Theres nothing at all anymore that points to a rational action. It’s intentional, it’s malicious and we as fans need to make Ewood (and away grounds) a no-go area for the executive team on matchdays. Nothing else is going to have an effect. If you need evidence - they’ve quietly asked their opponents’ exec team to get their stewards to take down the anti-ownership banners in our away end. The arrogance of that action while pulling in eye-watering sums of money as a wage to manage a football club into a potentially terminal decline is staggering. But I saw that the away fans were taking selfies with Waggott. How nobody there didn’t make that guy so scared he got into his McDonald’s-strewn, travelling salesman saloon car and drove immediately back to Kent, I’ll never know. We were fucking shit, except for Gueye who is my favourite player out on that pitch currently.

Friends and family up north have already said they’re not bothering with a season ticket next season. Today’s genuinely the first time I’ve considered not watching anymore since about 2011-12. I entirely stopped engaging for about 18 months or so, living abroad. Today has been a bit of an eye-opener, on a personal level. Was a little nervous this morning, wondering about the lineup, wondering what Eustace would be trying to capitalise on, while trying to look at it rationally, that Derby are relegation fodder and a mid-table league one side in a championship stadium. Essentially put off a bunch of important stuff due to fretting about this. Did the odd bit, here and there but it’s taken about 9 hours of my day so far. And I’ll get up now and dawdle about a bit, maybe have SNF on in the background and do something else in the flat, but it’ll still be there. And tomorrow, just as it was yesterday, Thursday and Wednesday before. And that’s me as a relative armchair fan. Think about the 2700 that travelled. Maybe a handful live locally or local-enough that the journey isn’t hours each way. But they all turned up, prioritised it over other things. For what? We turn up, we tune in and the people in charge cop out. There are people that have made millions out of this club while achieving nothing. The decision makers haven’t watched a game in a decade. And we’re still turning up every week, buying the shirts, the tickets, the poorly-poured pints, the hospitality, the pies, the Bovril and all the bullshit they spout. And they’re laughing at us. They’re laughing at us not being able to get a protest together for over ten years (25 tennis balls, aside). Laughing at us arguing with each other that no other person in the world would buy and finance us as the current owners do. Laughing at us when they’ve sold our best assets for medium-sized bucks and invested virtually nothing, before telling us they’ve “made significant investment.” Laughing at us when they say that if we want safe standing, we’ll need to crowdfund it. Laughing at us when they’ve talked about how impressive it was to have paid all our bills. Post-match, we’re all prone to hyperbole, but I think - for the rest of this season, at least - that’s me done.