I imagine people are saying the Riverside because the club would be most willing to rip the seats out and convert that stand. All moot as I just can’t see them being bothered to do it to any stand - though as we’ve said before infrastructure is not part of FFP, so the ‘never refuse a cheque-ers’ will oblige, no?

Tony Parkes tribute? Ive worked out what all that rubbish is outside the JW is, it’s all the cans he’s kicked there.

We don’t, Tony.

I agree, doing well in the third division isn’t ‘success’ here, but it wasn’t me that said merely winning games pulls in the punters. So a combination of being down to just c6000 ST holders, sky high match tickets and a pretty bang average team says we ain’t seeing a decent crowd this season - indeed a decent team at the top end wouldn’t either due to the fact we’ve sold so few STs and it’s £30/£40 if you just fancied taking in an attractive fixture. Great point re the Accy Stanley ‘experience’. Ewood really is a generally soulless, dilapidated place these days, and that isn’t just because of the numbers, Accy have shown what you can do on a match day even with a core of less than 2k.

‘Us’ Good lad, DG.

Andy Bayes mentioned Venus, but nobody does it by the sounds of it.

Interesting (but not surprising) insight from Danny Graham on Radio Lancs. ’On the training pitch, Mowbray doesn’t work individually or as a group with the defenders’.

The fact crowds hardly moved (apart from Oxford) when we spent months at the top of League 1 says not. Rovers fans won’t be paying £40 in big numbers even if we are doing well this season. And as STs make up the vast majority of our support and will be off sale in a week, the fact we’ve scrapped 6,000 sales says whatever happens crowds will be low this term. But where you are correct is that offers on tickets don’t really have much of an impact if the team is plodding about. Though Wigan before Christmas the other year when Dack got injured saw a hefty bump in the crowd when they were reduced. Back in the day, a match ticket/buy on the gate was reasonably priced, so if we were on a good run dad, lad, a load of pals would be down to Ewood on a Saturday bumping the gate. At £38-42 in the JW, that ain’t happening.

Thanks for the explanation…

But what I would say, though it is ridiculously expensive to buy a match ticket for a Cat A/A+, we’ve never sold many match day tickets, the crowd has always been vast majority made up of ST holders. The biggest issue and the reason crowds have dropped, again, is because we’ve lost another 2,000 ST holders this summer.

£38-£42 in the JW Upper for a fair few of the games. Absolute lunacy for this level of football, area and fanbase.

£38 at Ewood in the JW Upper. The most popular stand for walk on purchasers. That is certainly expensive for a mid table second division club. And generally you aren’t going to get good numbers travelling away when it’s £30+ just for the match tickets every other week, then add your transport, food and drink.

Thought a number of folk had heard he was giving it the big ‘un about ‘a number 10 flying in’ in the corporate suites last Saturday?

Because they are the only league club (newly promoted Hartlepool aside) between Newcastle/Sunderland and Leeds. Massive catchment area.

Some of these new ‘digital journalists’ need to learn how to construct a coherent paragraph before chucking in a load of jargon.

Middlesbrough is just an in between kind of place that a lot of fans just give a miss. Not exactly local, so you don’t get the kind of fans that would go to a game in Lancs or somewhere like Huddersfield and it’s not a weekend trip type like Newcastle. Or a southern venue where you have a good number of Rovers exiles living. Ergo we just don’t take many (especially at £30).

Good to see that the Old Trafford test that I have tickets for won’t be a dead rubber (probably!)…

I know it does, that was the thrust of my post, but heading into FFP shouldn’t mean the vast majority of your senior players potentially walking away for nothing. Of course a superior manager would’ve made a better stab at it than TM, but it’s a moot point. We won’t have a renaissance because the owners won’t appoint a Wilder.

All true, but it is still the fault of the owners, as we go from one extreme to the other - Firstly they allow managers here far too much of a free reign for signings and contracts when FFP is over the horizon somewhere. Then, just like in the late Bowyer era, the taps are suddenly turned off and we see a summer of transfers and contract negotiations as farcical as this one. Completely dysfunctional, it never changes, nobody ever learns, so your ‘maybe next year, Rodders’ optimism that once they let TM run down his contract we’ll begin some kind of renaissance is sadly misplaced.

Was just thinking that, never seen so few shocks in the opening round with top flight clubs… lots of hammering too.

Good format is The Hundred and Twenty. Maybe the ECB and it’s useful idiots in the media should have spent the summer cherishing and promoting those 18 institutions of ours instead…

Winning matches and seeing your club at the top of the table is the best entertainment.

Absolutely all sorts they could do, a captive audience of thousands of people every other week… there’s just no drive or direction down there to actually do something.

Please enlighten me Rev to how these ‘custodians’ are suddenly going to change course, as after a decade plus of this ownership the club is in absolute dire straits from where I’m standing.

‘Progressive carries’ … Harlequins sniffing around Rice, I take it?