Nyambe nearly opening his account with what would have been a cracking goal

Because Tony. I get the sinking feeling he has always been intending to play this when Van Hecke became available...

Christ, the Cov away kit looks like a washed out version of ours.

I'm confused. What 'incredible work' is involved here? He got on a plane, he got off the plane. Mowbray had said he wouldn't be involved and now he has decided to put him on the bench. That's not work, that's just a decision.

No worries. I just had a look, and when you're on the site, select Rovers TV. Depending on your device, I expect it will be one of the options at the top. Not all games are going to be available, eg if they're being broadcast by ESPN or someone, but I doubt that will be exclude many!

That's weird, I make that nearly every Championship side? I didn't think anywhere near that many Championship clubs had got rid of ifollow.

You should be able to get it on the Rovers website. Not available in the UK as it takes away from bums on seats here, but living in most other countries you can. We no longer use ifollow for this, Rovers are doing their 'own' now. As I say I think you should be able to find it on rovers.co.uk

But I bet a fair few of them would pay a reasonable price to watch the streams if pointed in the right direction.

You can be sure they'd do a far better job of taking advantage of the marketing possibilities over there. Although his Englishness is probably a factor in the mania, so a Prem team could do a good job with it too if they're interested. I haven't heard a sniff about anything we're trying to do to tap into this market which has suddenly opened up for us. Our tinpot CEO strikes again.

Huh, so he didn't give it to this guy then... I wonder if it was the same deal...

Cool, so all he needs to do to impress you is score more goals than anybody has ever scored in a Championship season since 92/93.

Only played for our u23s as you likely know, on a youth loan, but did well enough that we were interested in signing him at one point.

In 'fairness' he wasn't selling the whole academy...just demolishing their great training facilities and supposedly rebuilding them on a cramped site with the first team in an exercise that apparently wasn't going to make us any money and may even cost us a bit (I assume that's after the Coventrio took their cuts).

Predictions if all of our usual front three are out: 1. Buckley to play on the right or middle of the three. 2. It to fail again.

Pike is back at the club. Due to an injury his loan hasn't been extended.

Absolutely signing him was a very good deal for us. We got a class player for a while and a big profit, not disputing that at all. And I know he went on to sod all but that's hindsight. I'm saying at the time I feel we should have held out for more. Those other two factors don't affect that. Not sure how many times I need to say it but I don't give a solitary shit whether he liked it, whether he sulked, etc. Not. Interested. He wouldn't be the first nor the last player to have been denied a move they wanted. As I already said, he sucks it up and gets on with it so big clubs are still interested, or he sabotages his career. Few choose the latter. If we are going down the hindsight route, it's not like we replaced him with our 6 million anyway. Selling him just lost us a class striker and encouraged other players to want out.

I already told you, I don't care about that. Nobody else bids higher, he stays. Then he has to either suck it up and get on with it - a continuation of form would have seen somebody willing to part with 8 - or risks his career. If it was the only bid, we accepted the first bid that came along, which again shows that we have no idea what Villa or anybody else would have paid. We were soft touches, just like with Cairney and Raya.

We will never know if anyone would have paid that price, that summer or later, because we accepted the 6 million. I don't care whether players want to leave, and I don't care if 6 million was the most Villa wanted to pay.

No, regardless of how Rudy's career went afterwards, we should have been getting about 8 million plus for him at the time.

Not long ago I was saying I feared we had let Forest put a sell on clause in the deal and now rumours suggest this is indeed the case. I can only hope we weren't insane enough to make it 40% again, or anything like it.

Would you agree there are exceptions to this? When we had the dead rubbers at the end of last season it was ridiculous we kept playing all the loans and other players definitely leaving, instead of blooding for the next season and beyond.

What a piss take from some greedy professionals. They don't really care that their data is being used this way, they've just been told by an opportunistic lawyer they can make some more money. Pretty sure this use of data falls under legitimate purposes too. Otherwise I look forward to the whole nation sueing our bosses for using performance data. 'What do you mean my productivity is low and my punctuality is poor? How dare you use my data...'

Nobody in the league has more goals than him. Are there no good attackers in the league?

Why do you want a release clause in his contract, especially one that probably isn't too different to what we can expect next summer if he keeps this up? We should avoid release clauses wherever possible, only agree to them when truly necessary, and put them as high as we can.

Not sure where this argument is coming from. 18 months ago possibly not for some, but I wouldn't have complained as he was starting to look useful. 6 months ago? Absolutely. On bumper terms like he can command now, no, but by the summer he had shown he was improving markedly and that he was a player worth at least a few million. Given we had invested 7 million, were about to sell our best forward and didn't know yet about the 12 month extension option, why would anyone not have wanted us to extend his contract then? I feel like the pandemic is making people lose track of time. After the first lockdown, Ben came back looking a much more useful player. Then came last season, where at times he was one of our best players and we frankly missed him when he got injured, our form dipping. He did take a little while getting back up to speed when returning from injury, but that's fairly normal and ole' Tone likes to rush people back from injury.