Mattyblue

Why not? The BBC for example let you select between TV commentary, radio commentary or none at all for their live games...

Christmas?! What happened to September? Slackers

I don’t think getting a steer on club thinking on next season would be ‘empty air’ at all. Didn’t need to be any kind of firm commitment at this stage obviously, but just an acknowledgement that the club realises that they could be staring down the barrel of mass non renewals if they fail to recognise that ifollow does not satisfy a large chunk of the ST base, couple that with an incoming severe recession and fans simply getting out of the habit and we are looking at a perfect storm (perhaps the mood music coming from Waggott did give the impression that he understood this potential critical issue but it just wasn’t minuted).

It was Ewood Spark formerly of this parish that came up with the cardboard cut outs idea, I see. I suppose inanimate objects can’t tremble

So the FF didn’t press him on potential options for next season, quelle surprise. However, as Birdy (AB) gets to have his match day sponsorship rolled over to next season and not just donated to aid cash flow, I presume it will be the same for season ticket holders next season...

Convert it back to The Hordens, sure someone must still have those porn vids they showed upstairs

Or you could say he found it much easier picking passes when coming on 4-0 up against 10 men who had downed tools, than starts against sides going at full pelt...

What was den’s old maxim? ‘Have second (third) division players, get...

Bell is a third division player who is repeatedly exposed at this level. Cunningham is simply superior as a full back, either as a defender or on the overlap, and we really missed him.

Decent prospect, but it’s a sign of how far we’ve fallen as that quote is how we would’ve described Damien Duff 20 years ago...

They will get over it, then simply not renew... like you are planning not to.

In many ways we are coming out of ‘preseason’... and we don’t seem to start campaigns well (we haven’t had a win in our opening two games since August 2014, and generally do poorly in the opening month). Which obviously isn’t particularly fatal usually as there would still be 40+ games to play, but it could well be this time.

Anybody else anticipating an ifollow debacle on Saturday? (Obviously wouldn’t just be a Rovers issue).

Premier League here we come then! Because as we know it’s only FFP stopping our owners bankrolling us to the top! ?

Each to their own, but I watch far more Championship than the PL. Most game’s in this league actually have something riding on them and most teams go out to win, unlike game after game of safety first PL football as half the league tries to avoid relegation and mid table bore fests like Crystal Palace v Southampton

Interesting point, I’d say there’s a chance L1 and L2 mothballs without help - and reading a Gary Neville interview in the Times this morning, wearing his Salford hat he hinted that no help will be arriving from the PL.

You’ve missed my point morten. I’m not talking about the ‘Waggott Tax’, general ticket reductions and offers, be they match day or STs and all the rest of it. That is old world stuff. Initiatives to improve crowds can be looked at again in the future, in the ‘new normal’ as they say. I’m talking about the very critical need to maintain the dwindling core we have in the here and now as we try and negotiate this pandemic. And if Waggott doesn’t recognise that ifollow was a blunt instrument that just didn’t appeal to a large swathe of ST holders when pricing next season (next season being whenever fans are back) ‘the 8000’ will become ‘the 4,000’ and we will structurally diminish as a club and should prepare for League 1.

No problem ‘99, as for me it’s the crux of where Waggott has gone wrong since arriving. I always look back to, and I’ve referred to it on here before, about a conversation I had with John Williams in the 2000s. On taking the job as Chief Exec in the late 90s, the board said to him; ‘we have 8,000 fans’ Williams pushed back and said something like ‘Eh? But we 20 plus thousand home fans coming through the gate each week?!’ Their point was, even then, when the club was in an infinitely better position than it is now, that we have to work bloody hard as a club from a small town with unfavourable demographics and a fairly poor local economy in the most competitive region in the country for clubs, with mega sized clubs 30/40 miles away, to maintain and grow our crowds. The ‘8,000’ were a given and you had to work your arse off to keep the rest, don’t take the piss out of Blackburners or they’ll vote with their wallet. Williams therefore knew that he had to be innovative, flexible on price and careful not to piss them off as our fanbase didn’t have the depth of floating fans a city club in a less competitive region would have. 4,000 ST holders don’t renew? Your crowds go down by 4,000 as we don’t have the floating fanbase to take their place and we don’t attract many walk ons week by week, ST holders are the foundation of our support. Of course, the new owners thought they knew better and those people who knew the club and fanbase inside out were jettisoned, ridiculous decisions were made that were slap in the face to fans - like keeping Kean employed in the summer of 2012, so thousands of fans followed them out of Ewood, the vas majority haven’t come back and their seats remain empty. Waggott has since parachuted in at a time, in which through no fault of his own, those long standing ‘Rovers’ people have long gone from the club. So he sees a grand old name, a 31,000 ground, Brockhall, the academy, years of top flight football, and expects that we have the floating fanbase of the club he came from, Coventry, a club from a city three times bigger than Blackburn and a large support base across Warwickshire. But what is his fault, is that he still doesn’t seem to come to grip with the make up of the fanbase. The data surely tells him that our crowds are 80% made up of ST holders, that crowds don’t particularly rise here on good runs of form like they do at clubs from larger conurbations as walk ons aren’t a major factor here, that we have a core that turns out year in year out, and it’s a core that stands up to scrutiny to the core of a lot of clubs in this league, by the way, but we just don’t have the same numbers of ‘floaters’. So just like in Williams’ day, we must do everything we can not to lose ST holders, something he never forgot, but Waggott hasn’t learned in the first place.

I’ve no problem with the club being extremely worried about cash flow, we all should be. However, they also have to think more long term - I.e by ensuring a discount for existing ST holders for whenever we are allowed back - I’m not going to condemn them yet as hopefully they will do just that when the time comes. But I do worry that those running things these days just don’t have the instinctive feel for how the wider ST base behaves that Williams and Finn had, so they’ll offer nowt but a ST edging towards £400 and a good chunk of those fans with little interest in ifollow will just walk away. So the other half of the ST base may well see those fans as ‘not real Rovers fans’ or ‘selfish’, doesn’t matter, they walk away regardless and it’s another nail in the coffin for our crowds and we continue to contract as a football club and competing even at second division level becomes very difficult.

Yes it was a friendly, but the day I enjoy watching a Blackburn Rovers team get beat 6-0 is the day I knock it on the head.

All clubs are.... https://www.efl.com/news/2020/june/the-journey-continues-as-the-sky-bet-championship-schedule-and-tv-selections-confirmed/ 2019/20 Season Ticket holders will not miss any of the action as all home and away fixtures will be streamed via a Club’s iFollow (or equivalent) service

You enjoyed watching us get smacked 6-0?

I’m going off on a tangent here, but Barnsley (Barnsley!) having more season ticket holders than Blackburn Rovers can offer no finer example of the marked decline of this great club under this abysmal ownership...

I’m sure a lot of clubs will want to ‘do a Brentford’ but it’s easier said then done. Brentford have been building their method for years. Especially difficult at a club like Bolton that have been stripped bare in recent years.

Well one of them has just recovered from cancer, so yes he will show common sense.