AspRover

In my FM20 save I am managing in Croatia - Istra 1961. I picked up Dominic Samuel on a free after the first season when Rovers released him. He was appalling. Got about four goals in a season in the Croatian first division, where the general standard of footballer is probably about league 2.

A team that finished above us by ten points last year came to Ewood to stifle, defend and nick a win. We're going in the right direction, and other teams know it.

They changed the rules a while back so that all the clubs that trained a player are entitled to a (Very) small 'solidarity' payment when a player moves. A fraction of a percent, the idea being that a non-league team that produces a premier league player gets money over the course of the players career, depending on how many years the player was with them. No idea if that would apply in this case, but if it did we might get a couple of thousand quid.

A pedant nit-picks whilst a pendant hangs his head two : one to Rovers

goal difference matters in this league - we need to pick up goals where we have the chance, get a couple more lads...

I feel better already.

This is an odd one for me, I live not that far from Bournemouth so this should be one of the away matches that I would really look forward to. Instead I'm sat at home catching up on work and finding it difficult to work up much enthusiasm. I'm expecting to play one of the 'kids' in central defence - probably Magloire after the Leicester game - and for us to 'put on a good show' but lose by two or three, probably down to individual errors from the defenders. Then we will be told that there are 'a lot of positives' to take from the performance.

Is it possible that some of this comes from the owners? As in they realised that they got taken for an absolute ride by Anderson etc. and are now over compensating and refusing to sanction signings with big agent pay offs? I mean I doubt they are as hands on as that, but I can see sending a missive from Pune saying 'no more agents' and the club just having to try and live with it.

Don't particularly like the away kit, but watching the game it looks better on than I was expecting from the photos.

Pressing well enough, decent energy but against much better opposition. Can't get on the ball for more than a couple of passes, and our forwards can't win a header when we ping it forward. Going to be a long game!

yeah or that, but right now if you've got straws I'm clutching at them

That's interesting, possibly we're holding off announcing it because there's another signing imminent and they want to do the press at the same time?

A big red 'R' on the front of the shirt and no gambling? That would probably be the first shirt I buy in a while. I've been wearing my pre-Venkys era red away kit with the premier league arm patches and 'Salgado' on the back in protest for most of the last decade.

Venkys do like cricket though. No idea if they would be involved in the decision making process at all but could be enough to get a green light? Makes as much sense as anything these days

Been keeping an eye on football shirt culture - it has a page that just updates with new shirts when they are released, across a lot of different leagues if you've never seen it before. Its interesting to look at the trends - this year there are a lot of patterns and particularly camo in what would traditionally be solid areas of colour. I'm wondering what the chance is that we might be in for a patterned blue half this year. See the new Wednesday home kit - blue camo stripes (completely different manufacturer mind) I await with some apprehension.

I think I'd line it up Walton Nyambe Adarabioyo Lenihan Downing Bennett Travis Holtby Rothwell Brereton Gallagher Maybe? I seem to remember Bennett having good games in the centre and Holtby, Rothwell and BB running off Gallagher as a target man could work?

Delighted to hear you're coming out the other side of this. We had our brush with it here, it's rough. Hope the recovery is speedy from here on in!

weird one this but the 1995 charity shield game vs. Everton. Meant the square root of naff all, but here's the thing - I'm a (relatively) young lad, compared to many on here at least; I had been kind of aware of the title winning side from the point of view of 'we're the best' but it didn't really mean that much to me. I'd have been six or seven and you take it for granted at that age that whatever you happen to like is the best. I knew my dad was excited, I had a shirt, I idolised Shearer but I had no real context; I didn't understand football. We were living in London at the time, and that game at Wembley was the first time I went to see Rovers in person. And it was terrible. I mean we lost, sure, but my abiding memory of the game is one of crushing boredom. It genuinely set my entire interest in football back years. I didn't really get back to supporting football in any meaningful way until the Souness promotion season, and even then it wasn't particularly enthusiastic. It took the league cup win to really drag me back in, and even then I'd say the Hughes era is 'my' Rovers team. So yeah, a pointless game that very nearly completely killed my interest in football before it had begun.

I kind of suspect that in reality football players are pretty boring. I don't think they actually do much other than football and I don't think many are great philosophers. They probably filmed a load of stuff with the players (there's no way that at the beginning of the season they knew Maja would score a bunch of goals and then get embroiled in a protracted contract saga) and then in the end picked out a couple of 'stories' - ie. young lad making his breakthrough in O'Nien (the equivalent of how they portrayed Honeyman in the first series), and all the Maja stuff. On the whole I enjoyed it, I think it came across as pretty fair - the owner(s) were pretty flawed in their own ways but at least they actually seemed to care a bit and understand the situation and want to get the Fans on side and involved outside of purely money and football, the fans featured were proper fans - the sort you'd happily spend an evening in the pub with talking football.

presumably the scarf is from a supports club - the D will be a country or city I'd guess? The shirt is one of the '94-'96 McEwans ones, or a knock off of the same.

if we lose to Finn Harps we should just write off this season

I mean, it's Brad and Timmy and then there's a bit of a gap.

What I wouldn't give for a Zurab now, quietly classy, competent when called upon, versatile and never made a fuss about being behind the likes of Nelsen in the pecking order. Proper squad player in the best possible way. God I miss the days when we could afford to have really safe back up players just sat on the bench, the kind where if we got an injury to one of our key players we would just think 'that sucks, but at least we've got this guy so it's not the end of the world'. Its one of the big indications of how far we've fallen that gets a bit overlooked imo.

It's kinda funny, do you go for objectively best 11 or personal favourite 11? Head knows Hendry goes in, but heart just wants Nelsen and Samba back together again...

We certainly didn't see him at his best, but to be honest I think that was partially down to the fact that by the beginning of the season he wasn't going to dislodge Dack as the creative force or Smallwood in the defensive role so he didn't really fit into the system. The rest of our transfer activity that summer pretty much rendered him obsolete before we kicked a ball. A disappointment but I wouldn't put him in the same category as Murphy, a player who we were relying on and was just terrible. In the grand scheme of things I have no ill will towards Whittingham from his time here, quite a bit of admiration for his Cardiff career and hope he makes a good and speedy recovery. Edit - ten minutes after I posted the above we get confirmation of his passing. Tragic by any measure, no age to go at all.