I spoke to a lady last week. Calls were being diverted to her house. Apart from her and odd others in other departments like IT, rest are furloughed.

Sounds like we are at crossed purposes. Of course I wouldn’t have expected anything else since the 5th, that was Friday afternoon! Im talking about how we heard nothing from March till June. A lot of fans have felt in the dark. I’ve lost count of the conversations I’ve had with people in recent months, with them asking me ‘what’s going on with STs?’ ‘Will we get a refund?’ Surprisingly I didn’t shout at them for having the temerity to ask. You don’t agree that the club could have been more proactive with comms, fine. But getting angry about it doesn’t change the fact that many fans do feel that way.

Exactly right, so don’t churn out identical statements. Things have changed since March, if only incrementally.

Please do. End of the day Joe, as anyone that has worked in comms will know (like I have), it is communication 101 to keep in touch regularly. Even if it’s a ‘holding statement’, my bosses would have my head if I was delivering a project/or had paying customers and we offered radio silence for months on end, especially in a crisis like this. It doesn’t matter that there were no real developments. Some fans aren’t following all this as closely as we are, and will be completely in the dark without comms from the club, that’s just the way it is with a diverse customer base. No idea why you are getting so worked up. Especially as brfcs has been fairly mild in its criticism of the club since shutdown (which is most abnormal for this place), saving most of its ire for the authorities.

The multi-Season ticket household is a good point. The family of 4 all with STs are going to be getting a much poorer deal than the household with one ST holder.

I’ve honestly not seen anything refund related (including a pre-emptive flagging) mentioned by the club and I’ve read everything COVID related on the website. I don’t want to anger you, so I won’t ask you to find and post the link, maybe Chaddy can as he’s the king of links for brfcs...

You’re in a right ‘huff’ this morning. You said refunds were mentioned in the second quote, Paul said ‘where?’ and you went off on one and said you never mentioned refunds! Just that ‘YOU’LL GET YOUR REFUND!!’ Err Ok! Yes, I’d expect a holding statement just like that, that we are working with the EFL and we’ll be back in touch when we have more to share, just a bit of communication to paying customers. Keeps fans feeling in the loop, even if there’s little development. You might not be bothered to hear it, I’m not particularly, but I know some fans have been querying why they’ve heard nowt for months, as they aren’t as au fait with all the machinations of EFL plans, negotiations and discussions etc like fans like us are. Couple of lads I work with were asking me what’s happening with STs etc as I’m seen as the office Rovers nut.

Sorry still don’t see anything that says there will be a choice between ifollow and refunds, can you spell it out. Also, please can you tell me what the club has said to fans since March, before that email on Friday? I’m probably not a million miles from your position, I’m sure we will hear more in coming days and I’ll take the ifollow, however you are being very flippant to paying customers that have spent hundreds, thousands in some cases and haven’t even had an acknowledgement for months - just basic customer service to put together a statement to ST holders, separate from just copying and pasting EFL statements etc, that they ‘are in the club’s thoughts’ , ‘we are working with the EFL’ etc that would take 10 minutes for a decent PR team.

I must be being dense, but where does that even hint at refunds? I’m not particularly arsed about a refund, but we must have been one of the few clubs that literally said nothing to fans from March (Not counting EFL press releases posted on rovers.co.uk) until that follow on from another EFL bulletin in June, like I said not even a holding statement.

Lot of assumptions there, Joe. How do you know we’ll be given a suite of options to choose from? No point ‘having a rant’ either way until we know where we stand. But what I would say is the club have said literally nothing since March outside copying and pasting EFL press releases - just a holding statement/email saying ‘we’ll be in touch with our loyal fans’ doesn’t seem too onerous for a club with PR/social media teams, surely?

I watched the opening game against Switzerland the other day and the Scotland game, we were pretty poor until the second half of the Scotland match - Shearer header, McAllister missed a pen and we went straight down the other end for a Gazza special. From then on, we improved massively, and I think we would have gone on and won it, if Gazza had reached that Shearer cross...

Oh definitely, a decade of largely bobbing around second division mid table, with no real sniff of being involved in anything post new year sucks the life out of everyone.

That ain’t happening with Mowbray’s football. As Stuart says, the atmosphere only gets going at Ewood with exciting play - and that’s true with 6,000 or 16,000 in attendance.

So no change then?

Depends what you want from your club. Some fans have an expectation that they should see ‘entertaining’ football (mid table Championship level entertainment, at least), as well as winning matches. Me? Honestly, I really only care about winning, though the more games you win, the more entertaining the football becomes anyway as the team grows in confidence. I get the most pleasure in seeing a win, looking at the table, reading the reports, watching the highlights etc, plotting where we’ll be if we win the next few etc. It’s wins for the first team that improves a club over everything else, the whole point of the operation. We don’t win and I feel only frustration, especially if we ‘played well’. I’d say our crowd is a fairly even mixture of the two stools - as proven with the fractured fanbase under Sam.

6,000 rattling around a 31,000 all seater ground? I doubt it! At least mid 80s Ewood had some terrace induced atmosphere to fall back on...

I do, but I know many fans with much more of a transactional relationship with the club than I have. They certainly wouldn’t dream of coming somewhere like this to muse on the health of the club, they just aren’t that invested. They will find it much easier to just not bother going back.

8 months later, no? Still hard to get your head round, as we entered 1991 in a bad place. The team that were perennial promotion challengers had begun to be broken up, some were over the hill or constantly injured and we did well not to end up in the third division... fast forward to that October and what a ride!

Those posts above outline another reason why our TV money doped game is built on sand...

And I imagine a fair few folk will be thinking just that once out the habit; ’Did I spend so much time and money on bang average football’.

I’ve noticed you ‘don’t see the logic’ or find the views ‘bizarre’. Humans often aren’t ‘logical’, we are emotional beings, and there will be many, many fans far less committed than arbito or Parson coming to the exact same conclusion next time STs on sale. It’s not just about ifollow. Health and financial worries coupled with being out of the match day habit will create a perfect storm.

Sobering post. If fans with the passion and commitment of Parson and JH, dedication going back decades are considering knocking it on the head, then we really are staring down the barrel of the end to football as a mass spectator sport in this country. The authorities, a bit like some on here, are completely in denial to what’s about to hit the game.

Ha Waggott will be kicking himself, they’ll be out in January in future...

Massive revolt by Sunderland fans. Not only would there be no refund for ST holders if games re-started this season, they’d been told to just watch ifollow. Though L1 will probably be curtailed next week, so it won’t be tested. But what’s really getting their goat is those that had already renewed for next season have been told that they won’t get that refunded either, told to watch ifollow for the foreseeable. A full price ST (or 2,3 STs for a family) is obviously much more expensive than just buying an internet match pass for the house. And many older fans don’t do streaming and the like. Only 14% in a poll say they will now renew...

Course he doesn’t really believe it (well I bloody well hope he doesn’t for his sake), but I assume it puts his mind at ease as he watches BCD game number 46, the mouthwatering clash between Crystal Palace and Southampton or whoever, that these greedy and/or inept organisations are going to ride to the rescue of the wider game. ’Yeah, but we could all be vaccinated in September ’, ‘but the PL could pay loads of extra cash to the EFL’ ‘ the FA could pay for all the EFL tests’ (the FA! That well known interventionist organisation that did so much for Bury). None of this will happen, of course.