"All of this stuff casts some light on Sullivan's 'I don't like players' speech. Yes, I can empathise with his frustrations: they'd just been beaten 7-0. The fact that I was dancing round the room laughing doesn't mean I can't understand the exasperation." Brilliant!!! He never fails to deliver. The man deserves his own TV show.

Don't you have the opportunity to get out of Ewood Park at half-time with a passout or a swipe of your ticket? It happens down here for Australian rules games and it works a treat for smokers (smoking is banned everywhere inside a stadium).

I'm interested in what you implicate by suggesting this. Are you suggesting that he is on form in order to secure a place in the World Cup squad? Or perhaps that he is in form in order to be at his best in the World Cup? Or...?

3-2 Bellamy

I watched the game live on television and was very happy with the three points. I didn't feel like we were going to lose after the first five to ten minutes. Aston Villa were having horrid luck and I felt confident that we only had to turn it up a notch or two for a few seconds to get that win. It was "one of those days" where nothing went right for them, but everything went right for us. Those @#/?s had us worked out though, didn't they? In that link above the writer blames O'Leary for the defeat, but it's obvious that the man has some tactical nous and had a clear game plan that was working. The players should be to blame. They were either not good enough on the day or just aren't good enough, full stop. And we are the bigger club with the better squad.

Emerton didn't play badly?! Come on, Blueboy, you must be blinkered. Fair dinkum. He can't do a thing right that one. He's a waste of space and Mark Hughes doesn't know what the hell he's doing putting him in the starting eleven.

Gutted. It's a top performance, but we didn't get any points. I don't and won't get taken in by this "well, MGP got that Newcastle one and this makes up for it" rubbish. That is totally unrelated. This is another game. We outplayed them and we dropped all points. The referees didn't help with some shocking displays of blindness. The throw-in decision that led to the first goal was particularly galling. Gutted. Michael Gray showed what a shocking player he can be. I had absolutely no confidence in him successfully defending the third goal for Tottenham. It's a shame really that he has no real competition for his spot. There were many positive points to take out of the match, however. I was particularly impressed by the front two, despite them still trying to work each other out. They caused problems all game, with Sinama-Pongolle looking better as time went by. He is still raw but will surely improve with experience, hopefully getting onto those balls like the one he missed one yard out, even if we do only have him until season's end. Also, Lucas Neill is had a terrific game and showed what a genius he can be on the ball.

Make this count, Emo! And make this count, Rovers! A win here and we'll be riding on the clouds.

I did the BBC Premiership Predictor myself and came up with this possibility: 4th - Arsenal - 64 5th - Tottenham - 62 6th - Blackburn - 61 7th - Bolton - 56 8th - West Ham - 56 9th - Wigan - 48 That's 18 points from 11 remaining matches for us. I would definitely take that.

This is a fantastic advertisement for the club. We couldn't have won against Arsenal at a better time. This match was in the spotlight and we've shown to everyone that Blackburn Rovers is a brillian team who are looking forward under the guidance of Mark Hughes. My ratings: Friedel - 8 Neill - 7 Gray - 7 Todd - 8: His physical presence was imposing and he really kept the pressure up all match. He was the rock and the mortar in our defence. Nelsen - 7 Reid - 7: You can't fault his work rate, effort, or even his clean game, but he is too conservative and does not see enough of the ball, nor do enough with it, to be in right midfield. He certainly doesn't deserve to lose his place at the moment, though, especially after today, so put him there when Tugay plays and back into the centre when we rest the Maestro. Pedersen - 7 Savage - 8: Our driving force. Tugay - 7 Bellamy - 9: We are half a team without him. He is essential to our attack and we would not have looked like scoring anything without him, let alone the ball anywhere near the goal. He is the second-most essential Rover after Sparky. Sinama-Pongolle - 7 Peter - 6: He lost possession quite easily, but he is learning. This can only do him a world of good. What an opportunity it was for him to experience such a high pressure match. I can't wait for him to develop into a top quality player. Bentley - 7 Mokoena - 7

Take a bow, Sav.

The Arse'... they don't like it up 'em! Good one, Rovers! We were brilliant. Plenty of heart. Bellamy has proven just how necessary he is to our European aspirations with his performance. He deserved man of the match over Todd, but Todd also played brilliantly.

Do anyone actually tell these drummers what they're doing wrong, or do you all just grumble about it and put on an angry face? Seriously, I'm not taking the ###### here. If there is such an opposition to the drummers, why have they not stopped? Has no-one bothered about confronting them and telling them that they are not improving the atmosphere? Has anyone contacted John Williams? I don't have an opinion either way because I just can't make it to the games, obviously, so I can't tell you anything about the drummers. It's just that this issue comes up time and time again and nothing seems to be done. Granted, there are a lot of issues that can't be solved by pure fan power, but this one could.

It took you that long to work out that at Feyenoord they played no-one in a right midfield position?

Aye. The sending off of Tugay by the Ewood crowd was fantastic, too. Obviously most Rovers fans thought he had a terrific game. He is old now, but make no mistake, he can still do his business. Not all of his passes come off, but that is sometimes the price of having a creative player. It could be so easy to just have the ball stick to his feet, then pass it off only a couple of metres away and say that none of his passes ever went astray. He takes the risks, and those risks sometimes end up goals. You certainly don't get anywhere special without creative genius. And it's a unrealistic to have him pass forward all of the time. Sometimes we need to keep hold of possession. Giving the ball away, especially when there are no clear options, is a recipe for disaster. What we don't need is the opposition having the ball more than they should. Hughes has said that players like Tugay don't come along very often at all, so we should savour the time we have with Tugay at the club. One day he will be gone, and I sure hope that we don't rue that day by finding no proper replacement, which as someone has said already is Hughes' biggest upcoming job.

He will probably get a first team place regardless. I think Hiddink likes him because Emerton has experienced the Dutch game and knows how to play to his tactics. Plus Hiddink likes "modern players" (versatile players) and Emerton fits that description, being able to play on both sides of the field in a variety of position, and even the middle. There are challengers to his spot, but Emerton has played in all positions in midfield under Hiddink (left, right, and middle), and done solid jobs in all (without being spectacular), so it's hard to pinpoint exactly who is directly challenging him. All midfielders and full backs are in competition with him. But he that doesn't mean Emerton will be left in the lurch. I rate him a 90% chance for a first team spot. If he was playing regularly, I would list that as 99%.

Well, that last sentence is true, but I think he is one of those "needs to develop" players. If he can get some good coaching to teach him and thing or two then he could be a very good player. On to Sergio Peter: I saw him for the first time today and I have to say that I really like the look of this guy. Usually players his age coming into the team from the academy really look out of place and lightweight, but Peter dispels all that and really looks a solid part of the team. Nosworthy was able to bamboozle him with some cool trickery a couple of times in one-on-one situations, but I can see him becoming a fantastic player for us. Once again he set up a goal for terrific goal for us with a cross right onto Bellamy's head. Well done Rovers!

Thanks. I've concluded that it is probably his signature.

In my game (in the fourth season), Souness is still in his job. I can't say they are world beaters, though. They are a midtable side, although they seem to have the habit of beating me. Ranieri with Man City is another team that has can't stop beating me. Oh, and Birmingham City won the FA Cup in the 05/06 season! And finished 17th that same season. Bruce got sacked one or two seasons after he kept struggling (I think they went down), but he still got the Man Utd job.

Come on Rovers! Make this count! 5-0 to the Rovers. Bellamy 2, Pedersen, Reid, Bentley. We know we're good enough for Europe if we put in the effort. I am confident we won't do another Everton. We'll beat them and put ourselves back on track for the coveted sixth spot.

Are we Burnley in disguise?

I got 30% on the test.

I loved this bit about media corruption: Another Australian player, who spent some time as a professional in the Balkans, told me another story that was even more worrying: the deeply rooted custom of players and coaches buying off journalists. Almost every prominent player in that country had a handful of journos on his payroll, and the flavour of the press commentary on his performances depended on the level of pay. If he refused to pay, he could score a hat-trick in a game, each goal with a spectacular overhead scissor kick, and he would still be written up as crap by the unpaid scribes the next day. This is still rife in some places and it shouldn’t be surprising when one thinks about it. http://twg1.sbs.com.au/opinions/index.php3?id=67652 Obviously Eriksson hasn't been paying off the journalists!

Sorry, but since this thread has basically been relegated and I knew nowhere else to put the following article (as it probably wouldn't stand alone), I thought it might be good to change the thread direction briefly and have a look at referee corruption. It is more of a history article than anything else, but still worth the read as it's a very good article, with plenty of insights from players the writer has spoken to over the years. Time to call the cops Les Murray In the mid-1960s I was a junior on the committee of one of the more prominent Australian football clubs. My job, as ‘assistant secretary’, was to keep the minutes at meetings, listen to the deliberations of the older sages and basically shut up. The club had just lost a game of decisive importance by the narrowest of margins and there was darkness and gloom in the room when the committee met a week later. Some anger, too. One especially hot-headed committee member insisted that the loss was due only to one thing: the referee had been bought. To prove it, he flashed a photocopy of a cheque for a decent sum made out by the winning club to the said referee. Continued...

I don't understand what the fuss is about Kuqi. He was signed as a back-up player. He was never going to be a long term prospect, and to put it nicely, we knew he was a bit of a lump when he came. It has been unfortunate that injuries and a lack of options up front have seen him put into the limelight when he would never have been in a better situation for the team. It is frustrating but we can hardly blame him for others' misfortunes. He does try his heart out. That is why we should just grin and bear it for the moment. We won't be seeing too much of him later in the season, and possibly rarely or not at all in the next and following seasons. Well, someone's got to give him a case for his defence. Anyway, I saw the whole match in a replay, which was telecasted right after the match finished, so I treated it as if it was live. I was absolutely chuffed at the performance and the level of commitment. Bentley is starting to show what it is that Hughes and company see in him. I know he already had the potential to put in a performance like that but in years to come, not rioght now. I wouldn't even be playing him in the first team, but I guess that is why Hughes is the manager. He is a genius in his selections, and the commitment he instills in the squad, as well as a tactical nous he encourages with his thorough preparation before each match, make him one of the best managers in the league. I love this headline, by the way: United run down by Bentley. I was also really happy with Emerton. Here is another player that is not liked by many, but unlike Kuqi, he has the ability and today he staked a very good claim for a place in the starting eleven. For those who like the traditional winger, Emerton did that today by taking on his man by dribbling at most opportunities. His performance went unrewarded, though, when Kuqi failed to put what should have been a dead goal into the back of the net when he beat two United players and put in a low cross. Having a look at the table just now, we are on equal points and matches with Arsenal. Brilliant stuff. We're taking a steady march towards Europe and however unlikely, with some sort of brilliant run like the run from late December to late January we could find ourselves in Champions League contention. Crazy talk, but it's been a long time since we've been able to say that we are within distance of the top four. It's onward and upwards for the Rovers under Hughes. My quick player ratings: Friedel - 7 Neill - 8 Todd - 7 Nelsen - 8 Gray - 7 Reid - 8 Tugay - 7 Savage - 8 Pedersen - 8 Kuqi - 6 Bentley - 10 EDIT: Forgot to add the ratings for the substitutes. Emerton - 8 Johnson - 6 Mokoena - 6