Mattyblue

Swag answered it - ‘Other clubs are in larger communities’. No ‘think big’ here. We are ‘small’ and that’s that.

I’d agree with that. Lenihan always looked like a converted defensive midfielder to the very end to me, still diving in - which can come in handy in midfield as it can break up the play… not so much on the edge of/in your box.

Lenihan’s never been a PL player so won’t ever have been paid the big bucks, he had one big-ish contract left to earn in his career and he wouldn’t be getting it here, so fair play to him. Always gave his all whilst here.

Elliot Jackson commented on the HMRC story on Twitter as it broke, so he’s obviously well aware of it - but has Blackburn Rovers being threatened by a winding up order been worth a story in the LT? It seems not. If you wonder why it’s so hard to wake the fans up, there’s another example.

Then we won’t be lasting at this level much longer.

It’s hard to compete according to Swag as ’other clubs have bigger crowds and have bigger commercial opportunities’ Ah well, why even bother trying then as there’s obviously nowt the CEO and Commercial team can do to impact that.

Yep, Ke*n got far more grief on a match day than the owners and that’s when Venky’s were unpopular/treated with suspicion too - so JDT has no chance. Always the lightning rod as for most fans it’s just about the match, they don’t give the club much thought from game to game apart from maybe a glance at the LT (unlike us tragics).

Plan for mediocre results (I.e - well, let’s do enough to stay out of League 1) then that’s what you are probably going to get.

Well run club and transfers running smoothly? He definitely doesn’t want that - that doesn’t make good copy!

Nixon is being very pro Venky on Twitter, I’ve noticed. Must have some good sources at the club again. Just ‘ergh’ all round.

The ‘badly advised to begin with’ klaxon 🚨 But yeah, the fanbase doesn’t need to wake up as “everyone at Ewood knows they are the worst owners in sport” apparently…

Of course fanbases re-generate all the time. Thats life, births, deaths etc. And as you say anyone under 21 say will hardly even remember the pre-catastrophe era. This is their normal. But of course our ‘new’ fanbase is much smaller due to a decade of mediocrity and farce - a promotion would nicely sort that out though, just imagine if we’d had been nicely positioned for it recent seaso… oh

Been like this for two seasons now. ’Here’s £150 can my lad be the mascot? ’Has he got the kit?’ ’No there aren’t any’ ’No then’

Agree, he can stay for me.

Skint club not selling a striker who’s contract is running down for a million plus because he can win headers… in our own box sounds about right for the upside down world of Venky-Rovers.

It isn’t 2012 when that was actually the case with the fanbase. Apart from a few exceptions that know the score all I’ve heard away from brfcs since League 1 is ‘they were badly advised at the start, but they back us now’, ‘they put in tens of millions’ ‘we’d be bust without them’, ‘put more money in than Jack’, ‘we need to be grateful to them really’, ‘look at the academy’, look at Bury’, our fans are the problem, not the owners’… and I’d be amazed if most on here have heard much different.

Agree. Definitely small shoots, we just need to keep the momentum going, get the facts out there, get the media interested. But obviously results dictate everything. We pick up points in these next few home games and it will all go very quiet again… until the next time, of course.

You reckon he’d go into bat for us like Sutton would? I don’t.

Indeed, but nobody will, this is the point I’m trying to make. Last night I was called ‘pessimistic’ etc merely for pointing out the fact that this fanbase just isn’t currently where Reading’s is re opinion on ownership. So there is no point running before you can walk with it. Mass protests, abandoned matches just isn’t going to happen anytime soon, especially in front of one man and his dog for that cup tie. It’s going to be a slow process I’m afraid to wake our lot up. Try a ‘Venky’s Out!’ chant on Saturday and the crowd is more likely to want you out the club than the owners. It needs the likes of the Trust, local media, podcasts, friendly national journalists to start telling the story and it can gain momentum. But at this stage you are just going to get yourselves more demoralised if you have any kind of expectation of recent Reading style owner revolt at this stage - JDT will be getting the brunt, if anyone.

What are the chances do you think of that actually happening at Ewood a week on Monday?

Shearer? Doubt he’s even noticed. Very PL (and Newcastle) blinkered. But didn’t Sutton say not too long ago on Sky (Rovers/Leicester game, wasn’t it?) something along the lines of ‘what’s the plan? Is it just to develop players?’ ‘The CEO said he just wants to avoid relegation, not good enough for Blackburn Rovers’. I bet it wouldn’t take much to get him on the record to say more. He’s not backward in coming forward.

‘Get off the pitch ya fucking Idiots! Booooo! Get off!’… Is what you’d get from the vast majority of the crowd still in their seats. Unfortunately the ‘mass’ just aren’t where we are on brfcs. Good luck to Duffer and his banner and any other things planned, but we are currently a long way away from where Reading’s fans are. Maybe that will change , there are positive signs that maybe a few more are waking up, but it’s still a small minority at the moment, but from small acorns and all that. But of course you win a couple of games, they pay the next set of bills and it all gets buried under the carpet for another period of time.

Of course it’s not nonsense. There will obviously be ‘far less coverage’ (not no coverage) for us now than in 2011/12. Just the way it is as a middling second division side for a decade over being a long established Premier League side. But any coverage it did receive would be more empathetic than the disgraceful coverage we received back then. Oh and the Reading protest saw the game get abandoned so obviously a big football story on the day. A few dozen folk marching down Livesey Branch or a few banners won’t get much media traction so not really an apt comparison. Wrexham is an ideal opportunity for a protest you are quite right, but there will be no protest against Wrexham (well apart from your banner).

More empathy yes, but far less coverage as the public profile of BRFC has fallen off a cliff under this reign of terror.

In League 1. That lad is never, ever scoring 30 goals in the Championship.