2 hours ago, Dreams of 1995 said:

With the prem comes money though.

I bet they would. I don't know whether Kipre has been offered regular first team football, but the rumour mill would have us believe Baggies have him on the hook and are waiting for alternatives. That would make you think they believe there's better out there, and if he does sign it is simply a case of them not finding anyone else. It all screams of being unwanted.

I can only speak from what little we hear on the outside though

I’ve no doubt that he’ll be offered more money but I’m confident that’s secondary to the opportunity to play in the PL. Would you choose regular game time in a mid table Champ team or the opportunity at playing in the PL? It’s hardly a guarantee that he’ll be offered the chance to play at that the highest level again. Can’t blame him for holding out and I really don’t think money is the issue.

10 minutes ago, Dreams of 1995 said:

Cedric Kipre is obviously after the move to a Prem club. Why he is letting them mess him about like that is beyond me. Money talks I guess. I'm going to bet that Baggies have doubled the wages he'd be on here.

It is a shame because he'd be a guaranteed starter here, probably the main man in defence, and the move to a Prem club would probably happen if he continued the form he shown at Wigan.

This is modern football though, and he is prepared to be messed about whilst they look for a 'better' alternative on the chance he can double his wage and if he has to sit on the bench to do that then fine.

Don’t think money is the biggest factor. It’s a prem club. Simple.

No player would turn down the opportunity of playing in the PL to play in the championship. He’d get a decent shot at regular game time as well. It’s not like he’s signing up to be a 3rd choice keeper.

21 hours ago, chaddyrovers said:

The internet connection was perfect as we took pictures of the strength of internet connection before I sent my refund claim form plus other pictures. Plus we followed other advice given by the In player problem page. 

We had the build up on the game on then just before kick off the signal completely went off until it came back on for 8 minutes then off for the rest of the game. 

EFL/I follow needs major surgery in my opinion cos it could be still some time before fans re entered stadiums

 

Inplayer and iFollow are different things I believe. I’ve never had a problem with iFollow other than instantly regretting purchasing match pass after match pass when I watch the quality of the football on display.

2 minutes ago, Sparks Rover said:

Dack and Nyambe(who mowbray has pissed about by playing Bennett in his position too many times) won't be signing now.  Too late, and i expect they will maximise their financial position by letting their deals run down and leaving for free.....

Shit management yet again.

You have no idea how long these contracts have been discussed but yeah why not, criticise the club again. What would you rather the club do? Not offer new contracts? Or is that shit management as well??
 

Baffles me as to why some fans try to find reasons to criticise everything. Offering our best players new contracts is surely positive intent.

2 minutes ago, MarkBRFC said:

Or the ST's are just valid for the next 23 games they are allowed to attend....

If it goes into next season then so be it.

Possibly. Sufficed to say I can understand why the club are hesitant to commit to selling STs given the uncertainty. Can guarantee there’d be uproar if STs were sold and then fans struggled to secure refunds if/when stricter lockdown measures are enforced. 

Kaminski in today?

1 hour ago, JHRover said:

That's partly through our choice. We could have sold 5000+ season tickets like Bolton have done which would have covered a large portion of any lost income. We've decided not to so no sympathy there.

Edit - sorry just seen @Stuartcovered this above.

5000 ST holders who may need to be refunded before Christmas because they’ve not been able to watch any football...

Can’t argue with many of the names mentioned but in terms of financial outlay vs performance I’d say Brereton has to be  up there. One of our all-time most expensive signings and spent whilst we’re in the Championship. Completely wasted (so far).

7 hours ago, RevidgeBlue said:

I posted last night what I would have done, it seems extremely obvious to me - get people signed up on direct debit at a lower rate commensurate with watching the early part of the season on I follow  (say half the rate of a normal season ticket)  and adjust the payments back to a normal rate once fans are allowed back in the ground.

We're probably one of a relatively small number of Clubs who shouldn't have to worry too much in the sense that more or less everyone who wants a ST should still be able to get one even with restricted capacity so I really can't see why we haven't rolled out some sort of scheme. It would have provided  an element of cashflow and I think there is a real danger the longer people go without hearing anything , they'll lose interest and not bother renewing.

Even if you signed people up for a pound a month initially while nothing is happening, they're committed for later on when things get back to near normality and have to take positive action to cancel if they're not happy with the price or what's on offer.

Even that would be better than doing nothing and leaving things up in the air indefinitely wondering whether anyone will eventually come back.

Can’t you understand though why the club are being cautious? We have no idea if fans will be allowed in stadiums at all next season, especially with a second peak expected over autumn. 
 

I accept that it’s possible to have some form of token season ticket rolled out that could cover a couple of situations but surely it will simply cause more logistical headaches down the line? We saw how challenging it was to get ST holders free access to iFollow in June.
 

I have no idea why the club have been historically slow to release ST details (or kits for that matter) but I don’t blame them this time. They’re damned either way.

Just now, Dreams of 1995 said:

Then Warren Lucy is just another bloke at Rovers who is bad at his job. He probably doesn't have a clue about football though, and done a social media influencer course at an old polytech university. Now he is earning mid 20k a year to post absolute tripe on our social media page and has never bothered to look up our history. It wouldn't surprise me if there's a program in place which tells him about key dates and when to post what "throwback".

I won't get too angry at him for calling DG a club legend because it is Danny Graham but it isn't true. We name stands after legends, build statues for them and still sing their names even to this day - Danny Graham won't have a song for him even next season.

It’s astonishing how much of a reaction this has brought. Slagging off the media comms guy for a hashtag? No one is comparing him to Shearer. It’s just a tweet, pull yourself together.

DG has been a decent servant for the club and that says a lot when you consider some of the failures we’ve had through the door. Good luck to him.

Miles off. Awful result, forgettable performance.

Never looked like scoring against a nothing team. Rothwell, Gallagher and Bennett need to go. Bennett’s performance was embarrassing. 

We’re not good enough to leave Armstrong out of the team.’

3 minutes ago, JoeH said:

Yup. It is certainly frustrating that almost all of TM's "long term" targets never end up playing at Ewood Park in blue and white. 99% of the time we get very left-field deals that actually cross the line. In Stewart Downing's case, a great piece of business, in Ben Brereton's case, a poor piece of business.

We've supposedly had interest in this Kamil Jozwiak at Lech Poznan for well over a year now. Well now he's had the season of his life in the Polish league and every Championship club under the sun is linked with him, as well as some interest from soon to be Premier League club Leeds United.

It's so frustrating to see us miss out on deals because we haven't been proactive enough. I don't think anyone was so gutted about missing out on Bauer that it made anyone lose sleep, but it is a trend that worries many, we can't lock down long term targets.

How do you know what our long term targets are? Just because you don’t read about it on twitter doesn’t mean the club have no interest. Gallagher sounds like he was a target over several windows and we got him (regardless of how that’s turned out).

I’m not sure any club in the Championship can confidently stride out and pick up every target they want. 

2 hours ago, Ossydave said:

Seen a few people commenting on us having tricky away games but as I've said before, is there such thing as home advantage now? I guess you will know your own pitch a bit better and don't have to travel but surely it's not like it was? Playing Leeds at home without a packed Darwen end will also be more appealing.

We were the only home team to win yesterday. Home advantage definitely seems to be counting for less.

We’ve given ourselves a very good chance. Think the break came at a good time and our squad depth can be utilised with the 5 subs. Evans and Holtby returning are big pluses. Being the outsider also helps.

24 minutes ago, Mattyblue said:

Also in today’s Times -

QPR gave ST holders a choice - ifollow, refund or discount for next season.

A third have asked for a ‘refund’, now I don’t know if that means a straight refund or a deferred one.

We get similar gates here, so if that was replicated here that would be less than 3,000 refunds at around £40 a pop, it’s very worrying if the club thinks that is threatening the very existence of Blackburn Rovers...

They get similar gates... IN WEST LONDON. Be very surprised if we didn’t get a significantly higher proportion of our fan base asking for refunds. Given that the club make a loss on every game where we don’t get 15k fans, I understand their concern. I do think the right move is to offer refunds but I’m not sure we can compare our area of support to QPRs.

5 hours ago, Mattyblue said:

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.
 

 

My only issue with this, is that it is very easy to find fault with how the club are running things. I’m not defending them, but what is the alternative? Crowds haven’t significantly fallen since Waggott arrived. 

What would you do differently? Lower ST prices? Scrap the ‘Waggot Tax’? You’ve said yourself that we have a core 8000 ST holders and very few walk ons. Ultimately, is any ticketing initiative going to significantly change that?? If we reduced tickets by 25-30%, do you really think we’d get another 5k regularly through the door to watch Championship football? I’m not confident. Is it worth the risk? Possibly, but it’s not clear cut.

There will always be calls to make it cheaper. Blackburn isn’t an affluent area but we’re trying to survive in a league where clubs are blowing £25-30m a year. I can guarantee that the same fans calling for radical ticket price reductions are the same fans criticising our transfer business when we don’t spend more money. Can’t have it both ways. 
 

Blaming Waggott is easy. Actually providing solutions is not.

10 hours ago, Paul said:

I've read this several times. I've also read the club email to me several times. I haven't got a f****** clue what I'm supposed to do if I want to watch Rovers on iFollow. I've only a very vague idea of how to use iFollow as I'm always in the ground!!!

All of which, once again, demonstrates the extent to which football has forgotten about the fans. The people like me who turn up every single frigging match come rain, hail, sun or snow.

I have a MyRovers account, I have a log in to buy tickets, which doesn't always work, and now I have to make sure I have a "single MyRovers log in account."

The longer this goes on without any serious consideration for the fans who turn up every week the less likely I am ever to set foot in any football ground again.

I'm quite good with IT but everything coming from the club and football in general leaves me cold and confused. I doubt any of the people issuing these statements have any understanding of the confusion they are creating.

Football today is money. Nothing else and I no longer count.

All we need is a link, click here to watch Rovers. It simply doesn't matter if we have a season ticket or not.

Get a grip.

The club have said that they’ll be providing further details as to how the system will work. What more do you expect them to do? If you’re not sure about how to use the Rovers online accounts, have you tried to contact anyone about it? Or just resorted to slagging off the club on the internet?

Fans can’t attend the games for obvious reasons so ST holders are being allowed to watch the games online for free. How is that ‘forgetting’ the fans?

Clearly this is out of the club’s hands and I don’t see a better alternative to what is being proposed. 

58 minutes ago, Stuart said:

How is it self centred to say that if it isn’t safe for spectators then it isn’t safe and as a result BCD is a bad idea?

You seem worried about the financial impact but only for less than half of league clubs. The financial impact is worse for L1/L2 but they can’t afford to invest in weekly testing. PL and Championship clubs facing financial ruin are the ones who have been living beyond their means for years. Why do they deserve saving more? Let a Man Utd or an Arsenal go pop rather than a Fylde or other.

These clubs have become junkies hooked on TV money and unable to get off it. Meanwhile others suffer instead.

BCD is just a distraction and serves to prove that clubs don’t regard fans as being as important to them as TV. Sad.

The issue is that the players and staff can be regularly tested. The fans can’t. So BCD is theoretically safe. It doesn’t rule out the possibility of a positive test but the players are in a far safer position than the fans.

i see this as maintaining the integrity of the competition. How else can you resolve the leagues? Fans clearly aren’t going to be allowed to attend for months and every other proposition has significant draw backs. Ultimately, what is the alternative?

David Thompson at Charlton in the League Cup.

Bellamy’s first against Portsmouth.

q6. Are you sure we’ve been beaten by the same side twice in the charity shield? 94 and 95 were against different teams. So was 1912.

q18. Do you mean FA Cup semi finals? We reached the league cup semis with Hughes as well. We reached the semis again under Allardyce.

2 minutes ago, den said:

Well just finished watching it and really enjoyed it. I don’t think we’ll ever see anything again based around the emergence of the professional game, certainly not focussing on Darwen and Blackburn. 
Even though some of the facts might not have been too precise, the overall story was and this was the only time I’ve ever come close to really understanding what those times might have actually been like. 
some of the posts on this thread have also brought some reality to those days, so thanks to those that helped there. It’s the nearest I’ve been to feeling any kind of reality to our history, even though it was just a TV production.

I would recommend anyone who’s interested in the evolution from the amateur game to the professional game, or is simply interested in the early days of football to watch it. 
 

why did they never call us Blackburn “ROVERS”? That baffles me.

Because it’s an amalgamation of Rovers and Olympic. Olympic were in the final against Old Etonians but Suter played for Rovers.

1 hour ago, Mattyblue said:

Thing is both Rovers and Olympic have always played in blue (I know Rovers wore white for a couple of years right at the beginning), so should have been simple enough, why claret?

To clearly distinguish Blackburn and the Old Etonians who also wear blue...?

3 hours ago, RevidgeBlue said:

Have to agree with chaddy for once, to say there has been an over reaction to the corona virus issue is the understatement of all understatements.

For the vast majority of people the symptoms are relatively mild. How many people die of flu each year? Way more than Corona virus. Yet no -one seems to care or go running around putting people under house arrest or telling them  what they can or can't do because of that.

Are we now such snowflakes that we will have to go through this nonsense every year each time a new virus is discovered?

The encouragement all this must give to people whose motives are not pure is incalculable as well. If a relatively mild virus can bring the world to a halt and cripple the economy think of how much chaos they could cause if they were able to manufacture a more virulent type of virus. And we'd better not hope we need to fight any wars in the meantime. "Little Johnny can't come out to fight today, he might develop a sniffle."

Still, nothing we can do about it.If I thought we had any actual chance of making the play offs I'd be even more annoyed about the prospect of the game being played behind closed doors or cancelled.

Flu is a known commodity. This virus is not. The death rate is higher than flu and poses a more profound risk. Simple.

Rothwell has been anonymous. Again. When is he going to produce on any kind of consistent basis?

Brereton just isn’t good enough. Sad to see him so out of his depth. Bennett likewise.

Fair play to Bell. He’s done alright,

Get Johnson on and shore things up. This could easily be 4/5 otherwise.

8 hours ago, roversfan99 said:

I found the reaction to the Brentford result a little surprising to be honest, it was a chance to finally albeit temporarily break into that top 6, v a rival (who I felt many conceded a little too much respect too considering that we are going for the same goal) and were 2 nil up. Especially considering that the points we let slip were the 22nd and 23rd of the season. Was a major disapointment no matter how you paint it. We need to be as ruthless as possible from now on and not adopt a mentality of "a point here will be fine" it needs to be any points dropped are a potential opportunity for rivals to spring ahead. If you are genuine top 6 contenders which we are you dont fear anyone. Hoping for a win tomorrow at home to a bottom 6 side to get us back to winning ways and in to 7th.

In regular circumstances, losing a 2-0 lead would be gutting. But Brentford were better than us for the vast majority of that game and we did well not to lose, despite the sequence of scores. It was a point gained.

Tonight is a different matter. One of the biggest games in the last 18 months. It’s not over if we lose, but this is a massive opportunity. We have to capitalise on the results last night.

21 minutes ago, JHRover said:

Not sure how or why you would reduce the capacity. Whilst Ewood is too big for us at this level the club should have plans for the Premier League and growing attendances when there. Nobody actively reduces capacity.

Millwall have just released plans to build a new 30,000 ground. They've never been in the Premier League and don't get close to filling their existing 20,000 ground but have plans to grow and progress.

Brentford don't usually sell out Griffin Park at 12,000 capacity so in some ways a 50% increase is a lot to cover.

To reduce Ewood's capacity a new Riverside would need less than the current 4,500. That would look ridiculous and would be completely out of keeping with the rest of the stadium.

For me there is more to it than just bums on seats though. We need a 21st century stadium fit for the top flight and plans to have that ready for then. 

In an era of FFP and the implications of trying to comply with that we need more strings to our bow. We aren't going to get 25000 per week turning up and there's nothing wrong with that. But like Brentford we need to generate off the pitch and non matchday income. Hotel, gym, events, flats, offices need incorporating. Nobody can say that there isn't the demand because all those things are being built nearby. 

I don't think the owners have ever seen facilities and infrastructure as areas requiring anything beyond bare minimum expense and by god it shows around Ewood these days.

We’ve never consistently filled Ewood. We can probably count the sell-outs on one hand and even then, they include sizeable away support. I don’t think it’s contentious to suggest that reducing capacity would be advantageous. 

Brentford and Millwall are London based clubs with huge potential catchment areas. They can justify expanding their grounds based on that. 

The club needs to do more to increase non match day revenue. A hotel would be great and it sounds like the club are considering that in the long term. 
 

12 minutes ago, matt83 said:

Good different ideas but I just don’t think they give that much of a toss to be honest. Blackburn Rovers fc to them is like an unused gym membership to the average man. Not enough money to bother cancelling but not enough interest to get anything out of it.

 

 

Sorry but I think that’s quite a lazy comment. They are investing in the club. Look at the transfer fees over the last 2 years. They’re losing money every week yet still invest to keep the lights on. Look at Bolton to see what happens when owners are genuinely unbothered.

I’m not in any way trying to suggest that they’ve made up for the damage done,  and I’m sure I’ll be jumped on for making any argument in favour of Venky’s but in the last 2/3 years, I don’t think you can question their commitment on the financial side of things.