Mattyblue

The Ultimate List should just end in November 2010 with a black page.

To be fair you can't expect to buy players and have decent drinks on offer.

Teams that go down are always full of sob stories. But guess what? Jettison your experience and bring in cheap replacements who don't know the division and you end up staring down the barrel. Not 'unlucky', not 'if we'd just'. We aren't and we didn't and that's solely due to the very conscious choices made by this disgusting regime.

The protest has happened and is continuing to happen. We had an average crowd of 25,000 when they arrived, how many people were *actually* in the ground last night? 5,000? Any other club this would be leading to end game, the owners would know the jig us up. Here? Does anybody really think alarm bells are ringing? Or will it just be Suhail ordering more cut backs for next season and the next and the next until we are sharing facilities with Accrington Stanley.

‘Normally, it would be someone else here to explain what's happened. We have a lot of 'head of' in the club’ You’ve noticed too, Val! As always, the manager has to front up for a load of senior people that earn big money but are accountable for nothing and to no one.

If it costs a million quid plus, it costs a million quid plus. These types of works are the *absolute minimum* obligations of a football club at any level, I.e an infrastructure that means you can fulfil your fixtures. If the owners can’t/wont meet those, then sell up and fuck off.

I’d rather have a Weston Super Mare, but if it is to be a PL away game, rather those two than a ground we saw regularly (you know from when we were a top football club pre November 2010)

This is what those scumbags have reduced me to, hoping for a ‘big day out’ somewhere as it’s obviously totally unrealistic to expect to move up one whole division.

It’s the ‘rainy season’, so very silly of the EFL to schedule matches at this time, bit like when the ICC try and arrange cricket in the middle of West Indies hurricanes or Bangladesh monsoon seasons.

Everton or Tottenham away, as I doubt I’d ever see Rovers at those places otherwise.

We obviously are where we are as half way through the season and I expect, as always, they’ll just try and muddle through (and hope that rare metrological phenomenon ‘rain’ holds off on match days). But do they deserve all the opprobrium that comes their way in the meantime? Yes.

I attend and I’m happy to criticise ‘the club’ as those running and owning it deserve it, and there’s no issue in those that don’t go doing the same. Nothing unfortunate about it and it has got to the stage where it feels like they are embarrassing this grand old institution on what seems like a weekly basis.

Even the most liked comments on the LT articles have turned. Where art thou, Reg?

‘The rainy season’, ah yes, that famous monsoon phenomenon that only impacts a slice of Lancashire between Preston and Accrington.

After Wimbledon (we sorted out the drainage that summer) we didn’t have an issue for 20 plus years.

‘91 to ‘95 what a ride ay….

I’d have Leonard over Gueye any day, bit of a strange departure considering they weren’t going to bother with strikers outside Gudjohnsen.

I can still remember Motty’s commentary from that day, ‘the new grandstand has opened, the Walkersteel’… and it looked shit just two and a bit years later when the new Darwen End opened.

Artey the Badge!

Buckley, err, ok.

Starts at 5pm too, so get clocking off early folks!

Desperate for cash. Noticed a lot this season, an event that might have cost a tenner with a pint thrown in is now 30, 40, 50 quid.

£35 to spend an evening with that obnoxious fella?!

Season tickets, season tickets, season tickets. If you only sell c9k of them, your 31,000 ground will always be empty for midweeks, in bad form etc as the walk ons just won’t be there. Now, you sell c12k STs and straight away their is a decent base to build on.

Demographic change is a big part, there’s no getting away from it. The Venky destruction of the club came at the worst possible time as the 2010s saw a big chunk of the fanbase move further away from the town. Now that isn’t an issue in itself, many clubs have seen their original patch change and fans spread further out, I’m thinking West Ham, West Brom, Bradford, Leicester etc, those clubs are still pulling in the crowds despite the fanbase generally being more disparate. However, here the owners have deliberately dismantled the club *and* the fanbase has moved, it becomes harder and harder for fans living 20, 30, 40 miles away to make the effort when the regime doesn’t.