We’ll struggle this year trying to get any kind of festive bumper crowd, with the two home games this season being a midweek against Barnsley and then a Sunday 2nd January fixture against Huddersfield. Though saying that there is surely an opportunity to do a Sheff Utd-esque promotion for Hudds with it being a bank holiday the day after… I won’t hold my breath.

And often it isn’t even the players getting grief online either - I.e if you slag off Waggott or Bilaji Rao, you need to shut up and just ‘getting behind the lads’ 🤷‍♂️

Of course, they are a fairly honest, hard working bunch of lads, some pretty young. They certainly need supporting at the grounds. But then they always do, yet that doesn’t mean the wider club, the executives, the owners etc should get a free pass too… ergo I never get the ‘just get behind the lads FFS’.

We had 7,200 ST holders when that new 17 game ST went off sale the other week, didn’t we? (I suppose the minutes from tomorrows Fans Forum will tell us one way or the other). So well over 5,000 match day tickets sold is an absolute mile more than usual - as the Jack Walker and Riverside gave very visual evidence to. There is not a chance in hell we are selling a similar figure in home areas at £30-£36 for PNE. Now the club may not give a toss because there will be 6k away fans paying top dollar, but that’s a choice Waggott has made and home walk ons will take a hit as a result, and he will know that, it isn’t the have your cake and eat it situation you are trying to make out.

You do know that you can ‘moan’ about the club on brfcs, to your dad, to your pals, in your house, in the pub, at the office… and still get ‘behind the lads’ at Ewood or away from home, crazy ay!

Like I said, a reason, especially for slow starts. The main reason, obviously, was poor sides and managers that just couldn’t get a tune out of them.

Do you lot actually take a blind bit of notice of qualifiers? The proliferation of new sovereign nations across Europe post Cold War means that England usually have little bother (Wally with the Brolly aside) as they are always top seeds and share groups with a load of middling, generally poor and part time sides - case in point this group has Andorra and San Marino in it! What is anybody learning from spanking sides like Albania 5-0, or comfortable wins against a Montenegro or Lithuania? A long way from the 70s, 80s and 90s in which it really was touch and go most qualifying campaigns. It’s behind why the FA try and arrange high profile friendlies, UEFA have set up the Nations League, indeed it’s probably a reason why we always struggled to get to grips with tournaments as we just weren’t used to competitive games (a reason, not the main one!).

8000 home match tickets being sold? So a 24,000-ish crowd?! No chance that we would sell nearly double the match tickets we did for Sheff Utd, especially at £5 a ticket dearer.

He’s on his way back… Brazil? Obviously a tactical yellow to be fresh for Ashton Gate!

I’m all for imaginative pricing/marketing. But there’s not a chance we’d be hitting 20k crowds, even at £250 in our usual position of second division mid table. Indeed STs were actually cheaper than that around 2014/2015 time and we were nowhere near then.

End of the day the ‘going rate’ is only that at individual clubs when folk are prepared to pay it, value is in the eye of the beholder. But it’s all moot anyway, as if Rovers fans think it’s value or not, the pricing is purely down to squeezing as much as possible out of potential large followings of away fans - indeed that’s why we have Cat ‘A’ (PNE, Blackpool, WBA etc.) and ‘B’ (Luton, Millwall etc) in the first place.

£36 in the Jack Walker Upper which is the stand of choice for many match day ticket buyers… and that is an utterly ridiculous price for a second division game… though small mercies, it was going to be £42! Cloud cuckoo land down there.

Not even certain that the usual sure thing of ‘6-7k nobbers’ will happen at those prices, their current form and general fan unhappiness with the board. So it will be a failure all round. No big cash in from away fans (which is the actual reason for such pricing) and a potential to market a juicy fixture to our own supporters missed. Absolute fools down there.

‘The Preston fixture is a revenue driver’ ’We need to protect season ticket holders’.

I’d be surprised if we topped 15k at those prices.

‘Loved the Sheff U game, lets get two tickets in the Jack Walker for PNE’. ‘That’ll be £72’ ‘Err nah’.

I suppose Bradley Dack being ‘sensational’, is like the club tweeting about the ‘club legend’ in the form of journeyman striker Danny Graham. I thought they’d have been retiring his shirt the way they went on. As standards get lower on the pitch, so do those of the fanbase…

He’ll be going upstairs.

Almost 5,500 walk ons is excellent for us, especially as it wasn’t that cheap, still nearly £15 for a run of the mill second division game on a rainy November day. That volume of ticket buyers is very seldom seen here, Ewood had always been a ST dominant crowd - the issue is that we’ve lost so many ST holders over the past 3/4 years is that even a big walk up doesn’t pull in a big crowd. Now if we still had the 10k+ ST holders of that long and distant era of Gary Bowyer, we’d have seen a crowd well in advance of 20k on Saturday. Lose ST holders, lose crowds. Simple.

I see Sky are back promoting this individual (I refuse to even add the link), I thought we’d finally seen the back of the puff pieces that kept emerging on a yearly basis. He won the league with Brunei, ya know! That plucky underdog that happens to be the only club in a sovereign oil state! Any other one job management failures you can think of that still gets interviews published in national media a decade on? Wonder how he manages that? 🤔 Yet, he still can’t get a sniff of a job in the UK, even as a bib and cone man… how odd!

I’ve been a member since day dot, yet I’ve never received a thing, be it in the post or email, the £10 always goes, so I presume I’m still a member! Can it be looked into? Happy to DM on here, or is there a specific email address I can contact?

It shows how the game has changed and just how lucky Burnley have got. A decade ago, a Villa, West Ham, Everton etc. would have been all over Dyche and that lot would have sunk back to whence they came. Now, even a Palace or Southampton wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole, so he can just crack on getting 40-ish points whilst sitting on a mega contract and they can continue to ride the PL gravy train.

Well of course it was ‘private’, he didn’t wrestle the microphone off the MC! But he is obviously willing to discuss how the manager has just avoided the sack to whoever he happens to sits down with in the bar. Well you obviously remember a much less candid JW than me, yes he loved a gossip, but I don’t ever recall him being as unprofessional as the current incumbent when it comes to his employees.

As I said, the football industry runs on gossip, all fair game. And like you, I spent a bit of time with Williams and he loved his ‘off the record’ tidbits, but could you have imagined him in the Premier Suite, just half an hour after a big win saying to whoever’s listening; ‘Greame/Mark/Sam would have been sacked without those three points!’. ?

Letting all the senior pros run down their contracts is ‘strong management from Rovers’ What a model club we are!