It's funny how opinions differ, isn't it? In my eyes he's still clearly running his socks off. He looks like he's been carrying a calf injury for a while and obviously we've all lamented about the quality of players around him.

"Val, perform unsustainable miracles and you've got a £600k a year job for life". Our Academy is good, but it rarely produces a Wharton - and anyone since him that's been thought of as a PL talent has been stolen from the crib (Finneran, Phillips). That'll be the pattern from here on out.

Don't make me hate him.

I'm not surprised Beck broke down. Good job we got the Portuguese lad in.

Most of the fans have drifted away - you just have to look at a match day at Ewood Park.

And then quickly snaffled up for a nominal fee by a Premier League Academy.

I think he's a really, really good player, but he's a firefighter (and an excellent one) who should sit in midfield. For some reason everyone is convinced that he's a world class box-to-box midfielder and he just doesn't have it in his locker - as the above clip highlights. £100m for him was insane too.

We did all that, and more. It fell on deaf ears or we were lambasted by the football community for being ungrateful (and racist, if I recall). It's difficult to influence your owners when they're insulated from the fans by thousands of miles and millions of pounds. If our losses were truly hurting their bottom line they'd have wound us up or sold us by now. The Reading owner clearly wants rid and doesn't need the hassle. A massive difference.

Just get the Blackburn End to get a chant going: "Worst owners in football, you'll never sing that!"

Had a son.

No. He has one really good performance every ten games.

I think it was more just players being genuinely poor. Dolan having one of his 9 in 10 games, Hedges being completely finished at this level, Weimann demonstrating that his legs have gone and Pears being awful. We had chances in that game, but it was done at half time through individual errors.

Did you see the 'carefully orchestrated media output / fluff' from the club when Eustace was negotiating with Derby?

They've got to be the biggest Venky fans going. They'd be the first three out the door if we were ever sold.

The problem was always that he's not played for 9 months. Why he isn't playing every possible minute with the U21s and making 20+ minute cameos for the first team is beyond me. He has the ability to unlock teams at this level, but we're very rapidly running out of games.

It's genuinely impossible for a professional GK to look worse than Pears.

I see you're still playing Pears in goal. May I ask why?

Or built around him for a promotion campaign. He was already bossing the Championship as a 19 year old. There was absolutely no rush to sell him besides the obvious.

I hope the new lad is on £5k a week then or they're absolute morons.

I wonder if Brittain and Woodrow have already soured the squad on him. "Oh bloody hell, this guy. Say goodbye to your Sundays, lads".

Exactly, he's a poor athlete. He'll never make it in the Championship.

I'll never be happy about that transfer. Broke my spirit as a fan.

Depends who much he's being paid a year.

Well considering he tried to break Yorke's leg in a five a side I can believe that.

Go look at his managerial history. He's been sacked basically everywhere he's been except Barnsley - and often within 12 months.