gumboots

Abbey didn't you on a previous page start a thread where you asked who's this board's biggest idiot and admit it was you?

It's good to see that at last the sensible members of the board are standing up to be counted and, if not support Lucas Neill, at least accept that at no point has his behaviour warranted some of the vitriol aimes at him. As has been said, if we want new players we need to show them that though our support is limited in number, we are supportive of our manager and his decisions, and after all that's what this thread is about isn't it? Is Mark Hughes right to make Lucas Neill captain?

So if the players are asking you to get off Neill's back who is causing the problem? Not Lucas Neill as far as the players see it but a small section of fans. If you love the club as most on here seem to do then why not listen to Savage and Hughes and do as they ask?

There is no in-fighting at the club as far as anyone's aware. The problem is with a small minority of fans who seem to think it's acceptable to boo one of your own players just because he's said he wants to leave either in the next window or at the end of his contract. There doesn't seem to have been any falling out between Lucas Neill and his manager, board or fellow players so why fans can't just get off the manager and captains' backs and let them get on with their job, I don't know. I don't ask Mark Hughes or Lucas Neill how to do my job and I don't think they need fans telling them how to do theirs.

Notice that Hughes also said he needs the crowd behind him. He still hasn't decided whether he's going to let Neill go or not so there's no point in booing - if he ends up staying till summer and leaving on a free it'll be because at the moment our manager can't find anyone he prefers at a price we can afford and we as fans need to respect that decision.

To whoever commented on the fact that the pitch looked poor last night, when you've had more than a month of rain as we have then what pitch in the world is going to look brilliant. I was down at pitchside on Tuesday and I seriously wondered if we might not be able to play if we had the level of rain we'd had earlier in the week again.

Can you get it into your head that we know he doesn't care about the club, but that just makes him like the majority of other professional players? Most of them play for their club because that's the club who pay their wages and the best club they can play for at the time. While Lucas is prepared to play for 90+ minutes for us whenever he's asked to, and try to earn as far as footballers ever do the wages he gets then I don't care that he doesn't feel about the club like fans do. That's a rare quality in a modern day footballer.

How is Lucas Neill taking any of us for a ride? He was alert enough last night to pick up one of the very few decent balls into the box, bring it down and put it in the net. He may be error prone and may want away but he was still playing for us at 92 minutes. i'll take that level of committment till he leaves whenever that may be.

Try telling us something we haven't already heard a thousand times

It's about time some people on here grew up. Yes, it was stupid to antagonise ordinary fans who have probably never booed him but he's no better or worse than most of us. He makes mistakes but judging by the Eurosport pictures which we videoed ( I was at the match) the rest of the team, staff etc weren't unduly concerned. What Mark Hughes may have to say to him in private about the wisdom of his actions is something else. We should be talking about the match not a 5 second incident which wouldn't have happened if some idiots hadn't decided to boo him in the first place.

Have never booed an ex player yet as it only seems to wind them up. Have never booed a current player because it seems to me that boos are best kept for the incompetent officials and opposition players like Diouf who generally deserves everything he gets. that'll be at least 2 of us not booing then.

I don't know why so many posters on here think they know better than Mark Hughes what is going on at the club. He says back off Lucas and there has not been any adverse effects from keeping him and making him captain then I'm sorry but I'll believe the guy who sees him not just in the 90 mins on the pitch but every day in training as well. Lucas Neill may want away but he still looks delighted when we do well and as unhappy as most when we lose so just what do the people who boo hope to achieve by what they do. Fan power will not drive Hughes into selling Neill - only the possibility of getting in a replacement will persuade him that selling Neill is a possibility so he could be here till summer. Are you really going to carry on booing all that time?

He knows nothing. It was such a hard decision to leave chelsea that duff was off like a shot but so easy to leave Blackburn that up to the day before he was in Hurst Green saying he probably wasn't going and didn't really want to. Terry should concentrate on himself and his own team and shut up about someone who's no longer his concern.

It's habit. It's the good times you've experienced, such as that feeling when we got promoted, thrashed Burnley, won the Worthington Cup.It's the feeling that this time we might win, see the goal of the season or at the very least a close contender. It's the fact that, even though you know that nowadays players don't play for the club they support in most cases, most players give 100% to the club that pays them even if it's only to secure a move to a bigger club and so you do see some exciting football. It's the fact that you are all in it together. It's because there's nothing better than live "entertainment", whether it's good or bad. I've watched some rubbish theatre just as i've watched some rubbish football. At home I'd switch it off but live there's something compelling that makes you stay. I'm not a lifelong Rovers fan but it was an adult choice and I don't see it changing now even if we are relegated and so I'll be there renewing my season ticket in summer and trying to persuade the impressionable young people of Blackburn that supporting your local team is a good idea just as learning a modern foreign language is, even though most of the time both are thankless tasks.

See Ian Pearce yesterday only get a yellow card for handling in the area when the ball was heading straight for the goal? How can that not be a clear goal scoring opportunity? It's that word consistency again, isn't it? We don't mind being harshly treated if everyone else gets the same harsh treatment. Last man by the way is a media interpretation. Clear goalscoring opportunity or some such formula is what it says in the rules and they are 2 very different things

the one good thing to come out of last night is that more peole are seeing that Gallagher is not good enough. I have listened to people on here insisting that he is worth a start etc. and have never been able to understand why. As soon as he came on last night I said to my family that we would lose and ultimately we ddid. A team that has to rely on players of his quality to change the game is in serious bother, and whilst I still don't think we look like going down I think the current situation is the biggest challenge Mark Hughes and his staff have faced.

Don't know where to put this but... WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT IN HAVING THAT GIANT CREST BANNER IN THE DARWEN END??? Get it up the Blackburn End and get it passed around before kick off! This would be perfect at the Nancy game, then Blue cards lifted on the JW side of the BBE and white cards on the Riverside side. Bout time we got a little something special for an important european game!

The most serious problem seems to be consistency, not between refs but from the same ref in the same game. You could see how angry Mark Hughes was with the ref yesterday, not because he booked our players but because he didn't then book Fulham players making tackles that looked every bit as bad if not worse. Anyone can make a mistake if the game is played at pace and you are not in the perfect position to see and we all understand that but to penalise one side and not the other winds fans up and creates the wrong atmosphere on the pitch. And how was Bennett taken in by the Fulham players going to ground to stop play every time Rovers looked like they had a chance to break away?

I didn't say nobody misbehaved. Of course they did but large numbers of people were kept on the straight and narrow because it really did matter that you didn't let your family down. Breakdown of families, in particular people moving away from their home area, as well as other social factors means that the family is no longer the influence it once was. When it wasn't just your mum and/or dad knowing and watching what you were up to but half the local population being related to you or knowing one of your relatives, it really was different. I'm not romanticising the past - we all know there were awful things went on, perhaps more so than now - and we all know that there have always been kids who get into trouble just as adults do.

I'd settle for the away game at spurs last season. We were robbed there too.

There's nothing snobbish about expecting good behaviour anyway. Time was when working class parents were the greatest disciplinarians. Ordinary folk like me would never have dared let our parents or family down by letting anyone sugest we were badly brought up. We might have been broke but we knew how to show respect where it was appropriate.

Doesn't mean we have to treat anything else with any respect. Even idiots occasionally say something sensible or state something so blatantly obvious that nobody could really disagree. And before you respond to the word idiot I did not for one moment say you are one. I think you're actually the creation of one of our more sensible posters who just likes to wind people up then stand back and see what happens.

I think it's actually part of the lackofmatchitis I'm suffering from. How frustrating is it to watch the team going down the table without playing and not even having a new match to either rejoice over if we've won or moan about if we've lost. I don't really care about new players yet. I'd just like to see those we have playing!

The lack of goals is a big concern but hardly makes us relegation fodder just yet. The atmosphere around the club does not seem to be one of pessimism but of the very realism people here are calling for. The feeling is that all in the garden is not rosy at the moment but that there is equally no reason to panic. When you look at the players at the moment their heads are not down and there does seem still to be a genuine team spirit for want of a better word. i'll start to panic if our players start to look like they are not sure what's going on but at the moment no sense of that comes across to me.