Hang on, hasn’t he been saying the exact opposite since he’s been here? That Blackburn Rovers should be aspiring to do just that? Getting to the divide and conquer stage with the fanbase, as he knows his belittling of the club will go down well with many a modern fan and useful idiots like Dunn, lowering expectations ever more.

Amazing that the owners fall for such thinly veiled arse covering. Presumably they’ve signed off on the Cat 1 academy, the non-sales of playing staff, the PL loans, the BB/SG style signings over the years because that’s how they’ve been sold ‘the build’/‘the journey’. Now they are being told that we are still at square 1, but no recriminations, they’ll in all likelihood tell him to crack on for his fifth full season when they next have their Pune get together. Forget hitting targets, forget tangible improvement on the pitch/in results. And folk think managers wouldn’t want to come here?! It’s a dream gig as Championship jobs go.

Good thing about being on a journey, is you can re set the milometer anytime you want... ’“I think we’re really only 28 games into this journey, not four years” https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/sport/19095433.tony-mowbray-says-rovers-promotion-journey-just-begun/

He’ll be telling Tam to ‘slow down’...

He shouldn’t worry about that, doesn’t matter how many times we stink out the place on Sky, the same old ‘has his teams playing good football’ tropes will be trotted out next time we’re on...

It’s the change in demeanour in recent weeks that is interesting. A real sense of him losing that ‘jumpers for goalposts’, ‘Mr Football’ routine, currently it looks and sounds like a bloke going through the motions.

There’s a chance 50 points plus could be needed this time - indeed 51 of them weren’t enough for us...

Oh I didn’t get the impression that he expects to be potted, but that he’s bang out of ideas and would be on the verge at a normal club.

He is half American, so no surprise. The easier paced MLS may help him stay on the pitch. Even mid 30s, overweight Rooney looked fitter than half of them on the clips I saw.

I don’t listen to many Mowbray interviews, as they usually all follow the same ‘point(s) in the bag move on’ (or no points, move on) routine with no discernible change in tone - but that Radio Lancs interview was something else; a bloke kind of knowing his race was run, struggling to get a tune out of his players and pretty much asking to be put out of his misery. And he would be at normal clubs, but here we just stagger on, which leads to this total confusion and malaise you witness on and off the pitch on a match day.

Pretending that Warnock and McCarthy were still unemployed and you were asked by 10 Rovers fans this weekend ‘well who could replace Mowbray that would be any better?’ Mention those two and the majority would reply with something on the lines of ‘shit football, wouldn’t want that here’. Putting to one side the total denial that they must be in if they think they are actually watching ‘good football’ at Ewood Park, it shows how absolutely nothing has been learnt 10 years on from a certain sacking...

I would say they are very ‘soft’ critics, win against Barnsley and half of those on Twitter/LT will be giving it the usual ‘League 1! ‘Stable’ ‘who we gonna get?’ ‘Spoilt fans’. But as you say, it’s all just noise and there’s nothing to suggest those in Pune or their representative on Planet Stability are in any way preparing to pull the trigger...

I would say he’s still miles ahead of those two (and a lot of other managers too) Totally anecdotal obviously, but Im on a WhatsApp group and the performance and tactics were absolutely pilloried last night - but was TM seen at fault or even mentioned? Not at all. If that’d been Kean or Coyle or Lambert or Bowyer, said managers would have had both barrels. As would Allardyce. His halo has slipped in recent weeks, but he’s still as Teflon as any manager we’ve ever had.

I’m not one that puts too much stock in a manager’s demeanour on the touch line. Coyle, for example, never STFU for 90 minutes. However, last night was very striking, he spent the entire game frozen to his seat about 10 rows up the stand, never speaking to his staff or players. Compare to Neil who was cajoling his team from the technical area and in discussion with his coaches. All seems very strange at the moment.

Four teenagers on the pitch at full time, only one is even our player. That tells me we certainly aren’t on a ‘journey’ and so many young players just won’t lead to short term success in a brutal league like this either. Just muddled thinking throughout the club and millions being thrown down the toilet in the process.

No, but that seemingly is how they want it. They have employed a series of non entities and spivs with little executive power for a decade and the result speaks for itself. The 200 million pound question with this lot as always is, why?

We can keep talking about what he inherited, L1 and the like. But he’s had 4 years, never needed to sell a player, free reign at the club, new scouting set ups, Brockhall investments and on it goes. We’ve been back in this league three seasons and are now pretty much we’re we’ve always been this decade - second division mid table, and nothing says to me that season four will be any different. Mowbray or whoever as manager, at what stage do these owners actually expect some bang for their buck? Can there be any other club where this seeming largesse leads to so little? Or perhaps even stranger, is there any other club where these never ending capital injections are pumped in, yet with no obvious expectations of progress or tangible success on the pitch being required?

As in, Leeds had a set way of playing and footballers that knew their roles that led to them winning a lot of football matches? Obviously voodoo stuff that to the sages down Brockhall...

Next month, perfectly timed return to get his (international) match fitness back.

He will be here next season, obviously, but I don’t think the signing of a young full back from Crewe is any sort of marker either way.

Scratch that, Christ knows what the pitch will be like tomorrow as they are training at Ewood again. They can’t use the indoor pitches at Brockhall as Tony ‘doesn’t like artificial surfaces as they cause muscle problems’... Not sure playing on a cabbage patch is great for muscle pulls and strains either, but hey ho.

It’ll be reight, Beetlejuice said so.

The war’s over lads, the sage of football finance, Kieran Maguire, has stated on the Price of Football podcast that the ‘owners have completely won the fans around’.

To be fair, at least every poster on there doesn’t seem to be weighed down with two chips on their shoulders, unlike some other site I could mention... I’m not seeing the usual obsessions about ‘Plastics’ and the proliferation of blue and white shirts in Lostock Hall c1994

Following this game we’ll have a fixture every midweek until the international break at the end of March. Christ knows what our injury list (and pitch) will look like by then...