Mattyblue

I was the same. At least in normal times you are still doing your match day routines and feel that connection, a pint or two, the walk down Livesey Branch, meeting up with friends and family. But watching a bang average side go through the motions in an empty stadium with a bulletproof manager shielded by uninterested owners and executives ( who are more interested in attempting to flog off half the training ground) makes you question the point of all of it...

Hauling the pair of them off at half time neatly summed up the total waste of £12 million.

The club needs totally re-invigorating, Darren’s enthusiasm is to be lauded, but these kind of schemes work best when there is a bit of momentum behind the club. At the moment the extended fanbase is totally detached from Blackburn Rovers. As an example, if you made season tickets £199 next season after another season of nothingness, you’d do well to shift many more than the standard hardcore. However, if you did the same on the back of, say, a losing play off final in front of 30,000 Blues with a big campaign of ‘One More Push’ or whatever with a decent summer in the transfer market to back it up, you’d sell a shed load. (Relative) success on the pitch is the driver of the fans, not the other way round.

I honestly can’t fathom what’s going on with 1864, the WMC group turning into another set of nodding dogs a la the Fans Forum? Is there an actual group that is going into bat against this? I’m struggling to work out what the stance of even the Rovers Trust is, for example. Is it being left to the NIMBYs of Brockhall Village?

It’s obviously possible if L1 Charlton who are a similar sized club to us do it, if it’s obviously possible as pubs are still organising coaches from Darwen and Rishton. But of course it’s going to be bloody tough to get a good take up post pandemic and with the general malaise the club is in. That’s the problem when you dismantle club infrastructure (like affiliated supporters groups) and then try and re-build from a low base - a bit like putting housing on half the training ground...

The club has a hell of a lot of ground to make up. The dismantling of regional supporters clubs a few years back was a real short sighted move. Go on the website of many a club our size and there are whole sections on each of their supporters groups who organise transport, meet ups, Q and As, awards nights etc etc. Wolves have over a hundred, a dozen plus in their Black Country heartland but spread worldwide, all affiliated with the club - a real connection to the club is formed https://worldwide.wolves.co.uk/find-a-club/ A club like Charlton is another prime example, they realised that a sizeable part of their fanbase no longer resides in their old south east London heartland due to demographic change among other things and many are now around Kent and Sussex. So they’ve run The Valley Express coach service for years that picks up across those areas. https://www.cafc.co.uk/tickets/home-game-travel A hell of a lot of our fanbase no longer resides in BB1/BB2 and the further away you are, the easier it is to get detached, especially when grounds have been closed for 12 months - yet I see no urgency within the club for what is an existential issue for the future. Great idea, and let’s hope the club wakes up. It can be done as the highly popular London Branch shows.

Anyone else noticed how ‘Wexford Rover’ on the LT comments leaves a general pro Mowbray comment on most articles and gets a shedload of ratings for it, taking the post to ‘Highest Rated’ on every piece below the line... far more than anyone else positive or negative, which is odd...

First and B team on adjacent training pitches, you say?

Our local media aren’t interested in holding the club/the manager to account. Interviews with TM are just an exercise in teeing up soft questions that will get a few quotable lines for the next article/radio package without rocking the boat. The LT especially know that paper sales/website traffic is heavily reliant on sport coverage, so the last thing they want is to upset the local football clubs with the financial state local papers are in. All the President’s Men, it ain’t...

Not just Sky, even The Times is at it. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/vertical-football-and-intense-press-has-barnsley-dreaming-of-premier-league-return-pp3s6kz5c ‘Blackburn Rovers visited Oakwell last month Tony Mowbray did something pretty remarkable. The Rovers manager is well known for his commitment to expansive, possession-based football’ The rest of the article is behind the paywall, but it generally goes on to say how prosaic and hard to watch Barnsley are. Their fans must be hating their charge up the table, if only they could be more ‘expansive’ like us. £10 a game’s a bargain to watch such delights!

Exactly that arbito. I know I’m being naive in thinking we are ‘the club’, that it is part of all of us. But to see these here today, gone tomorrow low rent carpet baggers having the brass neck to dismantle our top notch infrastructure just makes me feel sick

What a marvellous stand the Riverside was... and its replacement looked outdated about two years after it was opened.

Up the NIMBYs!

I imagine Evans is one of our top earners, get him out of the door in June for a start and who knows...

We had their settee...

Always had a Phil Foden-esque gait to him (yes, a poor man’s etc), but has struggled with the physical side. Last night, he did a little shift of his hips to beat his man, and got to the byline to put a ball across for Dack and the Stockport Phil vibes were strong...

Still a year left on his deal and relatively big wages (he signed his last contract just before they kicked off their last PL campaign) would be the issue re Trybull, you’d think...

Thought Trybull was excellent, does the Evans role, but with actual technical ability. His problem seems to be attitude, as there’s definitely a player there at this level.

And why are Huddersfield doing so badly? And why did we nearly leave the division the wrong way in 2013 instead of bouncing straight back? Perhaps, just maybe, there’s a lot going on with relegated clubs on and off the pitch and it isn’t just as simplistic as parachutes = success, ay?

Of course it would, one of the naivest articles I’ve ever read in my life. Just shows you can post as many graphs about xG and the like as you want, but can still have so little insight into what makes football and footballers tick...

‘Baffled’, he was. https://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/sport/9400785.steve-kean-baffled-blackburn-rovers-protests-continue-despite-win/

Bit of an odd response 1864, you’ve gone from setting up a supporters group at Ewood WMC that existed to hold the club to account, to now just blindly taking their word on a vital part of Blackburn Rovers’ infrastructure...

Of course. If his trajectory had been 21st, 16th, 15th, 11th, 15th (so far) instead of 22nd, 2nd, 11th, 15th (so far) he’d have lost the supporters a long time ago - just like Bowyer.

‘Quizzed at the end of the season’... has to be Rovers then as that’s the only time of the year the owners take any kind of interest.

Nixon version... https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/football/14260689/tony-mowbray-blackburn-owners-boss-replacement-sack/amp/?__twitter_impression=true