Does anyone know any decent pubs near the ground where you can have a few pints without getting your pocket picked.

I always find it funny that if a player is more than 6 foot 2 tall it is considered to be a mjaor attribute if he can trap a ball and kick it in the right direction. I'm talking about the old "good touch for a big man" syndrome. As Crouch is paid several tens of thousands of pounds a week I don't think thatwe should be too shocked that he can occasionally kick the ball straight and I don' think he should warrant an international cap just because he can flick the odd ball on. In reality he is reminiscent of a new born giraffe and as for any new born giraffe he should avoid playing with lions. Ha Ha!

If he played for someone like Rovers he wouldn't be anywhere near the England team, thank God he doesn't though. What a donkey!!

I don't think making a lot of changes would be a good idea as we are playing well at the moment. I would go for Saturday's team with Savage in for Reid and Kuqi for Belamy. I may sound like a daft thing to say about the European Cham,pions but I don't rate Liverpool at all. They have nothing up front at all and if we defend well we can easily get at least a draw. That guy Crouch is an absolute donkey, how could anyone pay £7m for Ian Ormandroyd's younger brother. (Watch him score a hatrick now) We're haing to stay in St Helens as there's no room at the inn in Liverpool. Probably means that their support is made up of glorry hunting Southerners these days if you ask me.

I think he cut me off after I told him we were going to stuff them as we did last year at OT. Still didn't expect that result though. I'll try and retrive his number so everyonre can phone him next Saturday.

I won a quiz on Radio 5 this mornin on Eamon Holmes, Hearts beat Rangers and then we beat Man U. What a day and I didn't see it coming at all. t must be my lucky day. Can't wait for Football First tonight.

Robbie Savage....oh no we did sign him didn't we.

Thanks for the English lesson but there really is no need. Despite 12 years in Scotland English i still my first language but I wasn't aware that speelyng and gramur were such big issues on this site. I don't suppose that anyone reading this is aware of the situation with PPV TV on the Isle of Mull are they. Going to see Balamory at the weekend and just realised that my chances of seeing the game are about nil as the Shinty is also on Sunday as well as Hibs v Celtic.....bugger!

In the 80s you couldn't go for a beer in town without running into a group of Rovers players. I remember Saturday nights in Manhatton Heights when you would get Scott Sellars, Howard Gale & Andy kennedy in there every week. They just used to have a good drink and didn't mind chatting with anyone, probably because they were hammered. I think ost of them are too professional for all that now.

Souness ya nob.

I hope to God we play 4-4-2 on Sunday. Newcastle are dodgy at the back so we need to get at them. If we pack the midfield I can see a 0-1 defeat with Owen getting his first goal. If we go for it we can beat them confortably. Please don't give that arrogant git an excuse to gloat Rovers.

What a terrible game. If Bolton are good enough to finish 6th in the league then maybe we are better than I thought we were or is this just another example of how incredibly boring the Premiership is nowadays. A few Rovers fans watched the game in our normal pub where sopmeone wanted to watch Ladies Golf on the other channel. After 70 minutes I wished we'd lost the arguement. Bentley looked quite good though so at least we have 1 bright spot to come out of the game. I think its about time that managers (including ours) realised that football is part of the ENTERTAINMENT industry. No wander gates are so low if this is what the "best league in the world" has to offer.

The answer to the original question is none. We would rather loan them out and replace them with young players from other clubs.....strange!

Does anyone know what Owen Hargreaves has over Sven, pictures of him in Nancy's underwear maybe. The bloke comes on in every game and yet I couldn't tell you anything about him as a player, other than that he's crap. I am getting obsessed about this and have just checked the FA website and found out that Hargreaves has 29 caps and yet has only started 2 games since the last World Cup. There must be legendary English players who have far less than 29 caps. There must be something going on. Congrats to Ireland by the way. Can't wait for real football to return at the weekend, but then again......

Incredible as it may seem I think Crouch has an England cap. Did he not play in the summer? Scott Parker?

It just shows how weak our squad is that Neill being out has such an effect. How can Flitcroft repolace Reid in midfield they are totally different players? The way we pack midfield we are bound to have a lot of possession but we don't have anyone up front to pass to and no-one with the ability to pas to them if we did.

I thought we played some good footie for a change and looked good going forward. Lucas Neill had a great game and the 4-5-1 looks better with Tugay in the middle because he can pass the ball and keep the play flowing. Goals were amazing, I've never seen a better goal than Tugay's at Ewood. The only real downside was Emerton. He was useless and needs to get himself sorted out. He just kicks it into the shins of the person in fromt of him every time. So frustrating. I can't see Kuqi scoring many goals and his touch isn't good but he does put himself about and has a presence. I like him but think he'll and up getting stick if things don't go well. As for the crowd, WOW! I thought we had dropped by 3-4,000 over the last 2 years. Make that 5,000 now and falling. We should be able to muster more than 16,500 Rovers fans for the 1st game of the season. Our gate would look poor in the 2nd division (or whatever they call it now). Whats the betting on a sub 15,000 gate this season for a league game?

It seemed to me listening to the game that it was scarily reminiscent of a few games under Souness. We were playing well until we conceded and then we fell apart. Also tactical changes led to almost immediate goals for the opposition. I was alarmed to hear that we were over run in midfield. This was a Rovers midfield made up of 4 internationals and yet they are over run by West Ham. Does this mean that we have to play 5 in the middle or we can't cvope. My main hope for this season was that we might play a bit of football and entertain a bit but if the first instinct is going to be to go on the defensive then it could be another long season. As for Dickov, a disgrace. Did he have tickets booked for the Edinburgh festival and fancied a couple of weeks off on full pay or something? There is no excuse for that kind of challenge. I think that kind of thing is often confused with commitment. A player who is committed doesn't get himself sent off so needlessly and then leave the rest of the team to play with 10 for the rest of the game. Hope he gets fined.

12th position for Rovers, couldn't give a toss about the rest. Would love to see Newcastle and/or Bolton go down.

We are nearly always at home on the first day aren't we. Does anyone know why or is it just coincidence? Someone told me last season in a boozer before the WBA game that it was to do with us winning the FACup 3 times in a row, he was pretty smashed though so I took this with a pinch of salt. I'd had a few too and can't remember how he was equating the 2 things. I reckon West Ham at home anyway. I always thought that we reversed our home games with the Dingles and Nobend did with Blackpool. Maybe I'm wrong.

I was thinking about this and came up with an idea. Now it may seem stupid, but we may as well put any kinda ideas down on paper. Anyway, my idea.... Its obvious that the majority of asian kids prefer cricket to football. Now, thats not racist, sterotyping, generalising, its just plain fact. However, what about the idea of having a joint football season ticket at Ewood and a season ticket at Old trafford (cricket). And how many of Blackburn's Asian folk do you think are members at Old Trafford. Let me guess. Somewhere between 0 and 5 I would say. What a crap idea.

Yes its on Canal+, TPS Premier and Sport 2 Hungary. I'm in India next week so hoping to catch the game on TV as most premiership games seem to be on 1 channel or another. Problem is its at 1.15 am and I'm supposed to be working. I suppose there could be a bit more interest in Milan v PSV as well. Prediction: 0-0 and the same for all other games this season apart from Fulham who we will trounce 4-0. I hope so anyway as I have seen Rovers win only 1 league game at Ewood since the first day of last season. Lucky eh!

There's no point spending too much time laying blame, they were just plain better than us and were bound to score goals at some point. To be fair all the goals were the result of a great bit of skill by an Arsenal player, thats the difference between the teams. You can put the best defence in the world under pressure and sooner or later someone makes a slight error. Compare to the Man U game recently. We could easily have been 4-0 down at 1/2 time but at the end we all said it was a great defensive display. Lets keep it in perspective eh!

Still suffering from a hangover after a classic weekend marred only by a football game.Many classic moments including meeting Statto on Saturday night. The atmosphere around our game was far better than on Sunday. We were in Cardiff till about 2.30 and there was a right nasty undercurrent around the town before the game. I can half remember watching Sky on Sunday morning and they weren't critical at all of our approach.

Perhaps he is AW in disguise? Being from a cosmopolitan city myself can I just stress here that I am going to cardiff purely for beer and football related reasons.