Dan

Also misread the “death by a 1000 cuts”; didn’t think there were a 1000 c*nts running the club 😂

Putting your browser into reader mode should fix it. But I’ll paste it. Did a double take when I see the author! Thought @Herbie6590 had landed a new job! 😂 Inside Blackburn Rovers' slow and agonising demise under Venky's: How reviled owners have banned the local paper and turned on their own fans, the meddling from India costing Rovers in transfer market and why supporters are boycotting Ewood Park 12:00, 23 Jan 2026, updated 12:29, 23 Jan 2026 By IAN HERBERT, DEPUTY CHIEF SPORTS WRITER Unlock more of the best of our journalism with a DailyMail+ subscription - brilliant exclusives, in-depth insight and the writers you love every day After an afternoon of gale force winds and driving rain in South Wales, it was a bedraggled and rather resigned band of 200 Blackburn Rovers fans who gathered in Swansea’s away end on Tuesday night to see if their side could improve on a run of one win in 12 games. A group of local youths found an adjacent spot from which they could taunt them with a rendition of ‘You’re s*** and you know you are’ - but given the dark humour which has taken hold among Rovers fans these past months, this abuse didn’t really land. ‘Yes? Your point being…?’ was the gist of the Lancashire contingent’s response. When Mathias Jorgensen equalised for Rovers, the hardy contingent offered, ‘How s*** must you be? We’ve scored a goal’. It wasn’t the fragile young Rovers side’s 3-1 defeat which consumed the fans, as they trudged away to contemplate the five-hour drive home, but the sense that their club is without direction or purpose; presided over by absentee Indian owners Venky’s who, for reasons known only to themselves, are unwilling to sell. ‘I want someone to own the club who feels the pain we feel when we lose,’ says Ian Herbert (no relation to this reporter), a fan who rode the magic carpet of the Jack Walker years, including the Premier League title of 1995, and now hosts the 4000 Holes Rovers podcast. ‘If that owner is a guy from Blackburn with the right intention who’ll put in £10,000 a year, I don’t care if we’re two divisions down, playing a derby against Accrington Stanley.’ Almost apologetically, Jamie Hoyles of the Rovers Trust agrees. ‘League Two football with proper owners would be better than this.’ The reasons why this view prevails among many fans was written through Ewood Park, the day after that Swansea defeat. It is an unloved place in need of something as fundamental as a pressure wash for its green-stained exterior brick walls, someone to weed the block paving stones and to attend to some of the rusting steel structures. The bronze statue of Walker - ‘Man of the People’ proclaims its plinth - has also seen better days. These symbols of disrepair and others, including the cursed drainage system which caused the home games with Ipswich and Sheffield Wednesday to be abandoned mid-match this season – have brought fans to such despair that a planned boycott of the home game with Watford is planned this weekend. In truth, they long since started voting with their feet. A Freedom of Information request tabled with Lancashire Police by the Blackburn Rovers Coalition (BRC), a vibrant umbrella group of supporter organisations, has established Ewood attendances as low as 7,000, from a game against Swansea in September. (You know a club’s relationship with fans is truly broken when supporter groups are asking police for such numbers.) It didn’t have to be this way. Rovers were half an hour off a play-off place when leading at Sheffield United on the last day of last season, but that hope vanished – along with much-loved defender Dom Hyam and club captain Lewis Travis, both sold this summer as Venky’s cut their costs and signed 10 players, eight of whom had never played in Britain. Fans were baffled. Just as they had been when Venky's recruited Valerien Ismael as head coach after John Eustace left for Derby following a disappointing transfer window last year. In a 15-year managerial career, Ismael has rarely stayed at a club for more than 10 months. Many Championship sides with ambition would not have kept him this long. The sense of a plan is hard to come by because Venky’s have not been seen at Ewood Park since their co-owner and matriarch Anuradha Desai, known as ‘Madam’, visited the club with her family in January 2013 and her husband was hit by a snowball as he entered the ground. ‘They were determined to arrive in big limousines,’ says a source who was working for the club that day. ‘The club had just been relegated from the Premier League and we knew there would be protests, so the advice would always be to go in the back way. But she had to come in a big car and go through the front.’ It was a minor setback compared with the way the Indians were ripped off by football industry grifters who saw them as a meal ticket after they bought the club from the Jack Walker Trust in 2010. ‘I saw these kinds of people at the training ground, looking for their opportunity to rip them off,’ says a staff member from that early Venky’s era. ‘I actually felt sorry for the Venky’s people. They didn’t seem to trust traditional English football people after that.’ The latest of several Indian executives to have run the club for the Venky’s, Suhail Shaikh - also known as Pasha - certainly doesn’t take prisoners, despite a benign exterior, with sources describing him delivering stinging rebukes to staff for perceived faults and slights. Pasha’s LinkedIn profile suggests he was a breakfast cereal and dog food distributor for eight years, before becoming Venky’s head of international business and, he claims, playing a part in the India company’s purchase of the club. With little experience of running a football club, he undertook a football management course in Manchester after arriving in 2024 and effectively put himself in charge, having announced that the experienced chief executive, Steve Waggott, would be leaving. Waggott has not been replaced. Daily Mail Sport’s request for an interview with Shaikh has not been accepted, which is in keeping with the low profile he maintains. He has been instrumental in the localLancashire Telegraph being banned from Ewood Park after a tweet stating that he had prevented the paper from interviewing director of football Rudy Gestede. The paper has not published anything particularly offensive about the club, though Rovers deemed the tweet ‘personal’. So the media organisation best placed to explain the club’s actions is ostracised. Fans who brought a ‘Pasha Out’ banner into the ground say they have been ordered not to do so again. ‘People took pieces of paper spelling out the same message,’ says Katie Full of the BSC. She and others describe a club desperately needing football experience and intelligence. Head of academy, Stuart Jones, left last May after 13 years, to seek ‘new opportunities’. Head of recruitment John Park left his role after just five months. Director of football Gregg Broughton also left, replaced by Gestede, who appears to have no credentials for the role. Fans contrast this malaise with what they now view as a golden period from 2017, when the arrival of Tony Mowbray with his experience, wisdom and no nonsense, took the club straight back up to the Championship after relegation to League One, and re-energised the place. Mowbray’s successor Jon Dahl Tomasson was also popular before he became frustrated with Venky's and left. Shaikh is very much at the hub of Ewood operation and Lancashire based. But some describe a complex power structure, with Shaikh having a direct line into co-owner Balaji Rao, Rovers co-owner and Venky’s director, which they fear can result in decisions others have taken being reversed. ‘Decision-making can be interminable,’ says one source. ‘Suhail is a fiddler. He enjoys the power but is reluctant to front up before the cameras.’ The environment became more challenging after Venky’s came under investigation in India over tax issues in 2023, which resulted in them having £7.3million seized, relating to money they had used to buy a hilltop luxury home near Bolton from Gary Neville in 2011. The Indian courts imposed a block on the firm sending money to Rovers, insisting that they match any money transmitted to the club with a ‘personal guarantee’ to the same amount. The need to pay the guarantee has now been removed but insiders describe how they doubted local club contractors would be paid for basic services. The contractors were paid for those services, despite the doubts. The initial £18m fee Crystal Palace paid Rovers for Adam Wharton in 2024, along with the £9m Ipswich laid out for Sammie Szmodics and the sell-on money when David Raya was sold to Arsenal, effectively covered the working capital requirements of the club during the period when the Indian tax case prevented the dispersal of funds from India. ‘If Adam hadn’t been sold, my fear was that the club would have been at risk of administration,’ says Herbert. Blackburn is divided about this weekend’s proposed boycott. Those in favour form a majority, yet others don’t feel angry enough to disrupt their Saturday routine. ‘If people want to go to the match, that’s totally their right and they’re entitled to it,’ says Full. 'This is the way to tell Venky’s that we don’t want their ownership and that we are prepared to do all we can to help them sell,’ adds Glen Mullan of the BRC. In a statement, Rovers told Daily Mail Sport: ‘The club recognises and respects the strength of feeling among sections of the fanbase and understands that supporters care deeply about the future of the club. ‘However, at this crucial stage of the season, we firmly believe the team needs the full backing of its supporters, as we look to overcome what has been a challenging run of results. The club remains committed to working constructively with supporters and values their passion.’ Venky’s are not rogue owners, transparently dismantling the club in a way that provokes a public backlash which might force them out. They put in their estimated £15m annual funding, keep the club afloat, and otherwise don’t seem to notice a club which quietly dropped into the relegation zone this week. It is the club’s 150th anniversary season and it should be a joyous one, but Rovers are diminishing in plain sight and in Blackburn, the overwhelming emotion is sadness. ‘It feels like death by 1,000 cuts,’ says Herbert.

So that lovely Cartmel sticky toffee pudding, do you put hot or cold custard on it?

De Neve and Henriksson must be two of the worst players we’ve had in years. So depressing seeing and reading about AW and his knack of one touch passes, most of our lot need 10 touches.

Yes please ❤️

I wouldn't say it turns me on as such, but it definitely has my mouth watering. 😉

He's deserved it tonight, our plight will be hurting him as much as the rest of us, if not more as he won't blame the powers that be.

and a lovely Lancashire bottom muffin 😉

Don't hold back mate, we don't get many wins!! 😄

Nearly as tasty as the large meat feast pizza and Pepsi Max our Chadster will be rightfully wolfing down later 😄 😋

Big Sam wouldn't work for that total cunt Rudy, he had him figured out from the Podcast.

Venky's Rovers keep breaking the records...

You're correct mate, the soul has all gone, just a body pertaining to be Rovers remains. At least Zombies have a bit of passion about them. I'd fancy myself in an apocalypse against Zombie Rovers. Just lock the front door and they wouldn't be able to figure out a way in.

De Neve

He's been a company yes man for years, no better than Dunn and co.

Yuki's new shirt doesn't have a name on it. They must have just one each. The budget must be spent on Rudy's suites.

Warren reminds me of side kick Simon, pity we've not got Partridge as commentor.

Manager isn't the problem. Jordan Rhodes would probably be the replacement.

We've sold all the good defenders and leaders we had. Venky's and Rudy deliberately downgrading us to relegate us.

I think he's being sarcastic?

Don't worry Valery will know what to do 🙄

Sorry for the post spamming guys, I’m already in a bad mood and we haven’t kicked off yet 😭

You won’t want to access it, they’ve done you a favour mate.

‘Val’ is doing exactly what they want. The last two manager left as they had ideas above their station. I imagine they’d rather have a Mowbray pottering around mid table with zero ambition, asleep on the bench half the time, but mid table in league one might suit them better.