BRFCS goggles are in fine fettle when David Raya is a crown jewel and Adam turns from being a clapped out pensioner the day he arrived at Brockhall to someone who will single-handedly destroy our top 6 hopes when he left three weeks later. Things clearly didn’t pan out with the new goalie(s), but even a slight upgrade and £3 million extra to spend now gets my vote. Maybe Fisher will be ready next year. Also, I’d have chipped in a fiver myself to pay for Travis and Buckley to spend three weeks training with Charlie Adam.

Personally, I always thought a 7-1 defeat didn’t necessarily have to mean a sacking...

I’ve never understood why every transfer glitch is laid at Mowbray’s door when the paymasters are in India and, even when they agree a fee, agreeing and arranging the scheduling of the money coming over will be a complete ballsache from this end as they will be more worried about what works for them than what the other club want.

If you called everyone at work who gave information that later transpired to have been incorrect a liar, you’d be in a lot more bother...

He’s not been any good at all for the last year....

We’ve had the consultants in in the meantime Tony, so they may have put new cash flow guidelines in place (I’d love one of their reports to leak into the public domain). They wouldn’t have been doing their jobs properly if they hadn’t highlighted the financial benefits of sell early, buy late in the window.

I’m betting cash flow. Ties in with something quoted on here recently about us wanting to spread payments over life of contracts to match how they are accounted for. Same budget as last year or not, it all has to come over from India and I’m guessing there may be issues on the phasing of it coming over.

If only! This is mostly the Mowbray is thick/useless/deluded/flipflopping topic. Far too much hand-wringing about the order of acquisitions IMO. Free agents got landed first as their lack of employment/salary might have meant they’d go anywhere; then our long-term target; now we are onto the possibles lists. Given each candidate will have different fees/wages, I’m expecting to see a couple of “outs” before we plump for who is coming in given budgets will need to be balanced: shift high earners like Evans and Mulgrew and we can raise our sights.

Blacklaw/Barton, Fryatt, Coddington, Kopel, Darling, Hill. We had half a promotion team and half a relegation team, then we sold Sir Keith followed by Knighton (what a captain he was!)

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I remember Barton being in the reserves while Blacklaw was in the team, with Sir Roger then taking over and showing us what a proper keeper looked like (aside from his forays dribbling to the halfway line, which I have never seen since.)

John Barton - 5’10” and 13st 4lbs - our own version of William “Fatty” Foulke! Except not as good.

There’s a page about him in one of Fergie’s books - the only defender SAF was ever scared to play against, and that was when they were both in their teams’ reserves!

I thought he was our best player that day, and it seems the manager did too given that, from that point on, he picked Travis more often than Evans and Smallwood put together. So it seems his favouritism is somewhat brittle...

Am I the only one watching this? Cracking game so far between Peru and Chile: lots of skill, both looking to attack, proper kits too - half expecting Cubillas to pop up and smash one in. Conversely, Brazil vs Argentina last night was dreadful, everything that’s bad about the modern men’s game. I hadn’t realized how little Messi does off the ball, he spent half the game not moving at all.

Second best throughout, gave the ball away constantly. Was the plan for VAR that it would disallow goals and award pens for minuscule infractions invisible to the naked eye? And what happened to daylight between the forward and the last defender?

Not when Goulon was available

Mine too. I played goalie as school and got kicked full in the face going down at someone’s feet; spat out two back teeth. I never fancied it after that, not that I was any good mind, as Arbitro will confirm. Mowbray and the defence clearly lost faith in him, which didn’t help any of them. Time to go I feel.

MacNamee transformed our team more than Shearer did imo. There should be a statue of the man at Ewood, preferably of him stamping on that forward when the ball was half a pitch away, or when he scored that screamer from the centre circle against high-riding Brighton.

....to fight it out and maybe earn a spot. He was always a back up IMO, now we have less of a need for a back up and a much greater need for a starter. Which is probably why we didn’t move heaven and earth to sign him.

Someone better than Bauer who we haven’t bought yet. When we were chasing Bauer we weren’t trying to replace Mulgrew; now we are and Bauer isn’t it.

The pages of Bauer-induced Mowbray-bashing miss one crucial aspect: when he was being chased in prior windows, we had two picked if fit CBs in Mulgrew and Lenihan, therefore Bauer was being pursued as a better 3rd CB than Downing or Williams, which sounds about his level. Fast-forward to this window where Charlie has imploded and lost his place to basically anyone. So we are after a picked if fit starter which Bauer isn’t. If he had come he would’ve been fighting Mulgrew for the 3rd spot, which I’m not sure we really need. So, thanks to Mulgrew’s rapid and unexpected demise, our needs changed between windows, and Bauer doesn’t meet those needs.

I remember thinking during his first season that here was the heir to Sir Roger. Imagine now signing a player from Stafford Rangers and putting him straight in the team!

I remember going on it at least twice, Watford and Cambridge? Birdy was running the bar cart and the disco coach depressingly girl-free.

He’s explained it at least five times that I’ve read or listened to: contracts will be honoured, ergo no-one on a contract will be forced out. There never was going to be a mass clear-out.