I take it game by game and i don't expect to just keep throwing them away after handing the opposition wave after wave of counter attacks by giving the ball away endlessly on the edge of their box. I'd also like to spend 800 grand on a goalkeeper who actually has the basic fundamentals of a goalkeeper. Not a great deal to 'expect' you might agree.

Lowe at Preston has them over achieving on a thin squad for the first half of every season and they like us fall short. He gets pelters though because of some of his in game decisions and they keep blowing games late. The truth, as is at Ewood, will lie somewhere in the middle, poorly funded invested squad, injuries AND lack of nous at times from the sidelines.

If we could provide him with the tools he needs for his way we'd be trooping off winning or losing 4-2 every week but probably saying similar things. Like 'why' do we persist in carving ourselves open all the time, surely someone in training would start schooling them in how to put a foot on the ball. Don't keep playing it straight into the middle looking to go on the turn and look to expand the game a little bit instead of treating the ball like a hot potato when we are winning.

Bring on a lump up top and aim for him with the ten counter attacks per min the opposition are giving you, yep non league stuff.

You know my feelings the guy really needs some backing to play the way he wants to but in the absence of that he needs to seriously rethink what he's doing. The club as it is deserves and probably needs a plodder but as fans we want ambition and an ambitious approach and JDT has that in spades. Have to say though with this squad it isn't really working now there are huge flaws in it that are being exposed weekly. So where do we go from here ?

No pal because normally there are 11/12k home fans and a few hundred always start mooching out on 85 mins whatever the score. Fuck off the Riverside stand for something without a motorway at the front of it and problem solved. Anybody remember the similar stand at Bristol City a years back ? It had the same issues. The team and management let the fans down again yesterday not the other way around. We bang on about prices etc but every time we draw thousands extra in it ends in shoite.

Mate, Leo couldn't walk back from the brew machine without spilling it.

Not read through the thread so don't know the general gist but me personally i'm fed up of watching such naivety literally throwing games away. Yes we know the issues with the squad but you have to find a way around that instead of trying to 'Man City. everybody and continually falling short. As iv'e said for weeks now the in game management is non existent and the naivety is now beyond 'young' team excuses it's schoolboy stuff. We actually chase games we are winning and leave so much space at the back and in wide areas bloody Chorley would exploit that never mind teams with options on the bench. I'd swap Leo for Vince O'Keefe at this moment in time, he makes Darren Collier look good, come back Stephen as soon as possible.

Right about turning up when winning but wrong about bigger latent support as cherry picking a few seasons in the 80's aside that doesn't stack up. Cheap season tickets combined with fresh hands on ownership and a team that should be winning promotion is what has given them the shot in the arm to get what they are getting now. If they hadn't done cheap STs they'd be averaging thousands less and if at some point in recent times we'd done a similar deal we'd be averaging thousands more. There is nothing more to it than that except a denser immediate catchment area which obviously helps a bit.

Remember nipping to Ewood one morning years ago to get some tickets about 11 am and seeing 4 car loads of Asian lads heading out of town with Liverpool scarves out the windows and them all kitted up inside. They were at home in an early kick off, sickening stuff but it's too ingrained in this area to go away. Plenty scruffy looking white lads troop around the boro in various red rag shirts as well. Mainly stems back to the 80's glory hunting and 90's SKY hype era despite us being good as well. Got to work hard on future generations from all communities but pricing them out has bad consequences down the line when the only attraction to supporting the club is because it's local.

I was tempted to go nil nil it's going to happen sooner or later.

Please don't freeze, every time there is a gate like this in the home sections it tends to lead to a performance that won't bring them straight back ! Oxford aside which was years ago now. Rovers 3 Hornets 2 in a barn burner. In reality....... Rovers 1 Watford 1 18,358 (1,400 away)

Swings and roundabouts if they were more successful then they'd obviously have a bigger active fanbase, didnt they have top flight spells in the 70's and 80's unlike us ? Where did they all fook off to when they were struggling later on ?

Tremendous support the club was reborn a few years ago and of course a winning team in any division is an easier sell to a reasonable sized fanbase. Had some banter with a Bolton lad i know when he was having a dig i just flashed up their crowd stats from their Championship years and stopped him right in his tracks. Not many clubs grow their fanbase from relegation to league 1 one but they did as their Championship and Prem gates were almost the same as ours. A real lesson there but it would never be acknowledged by our suits they are far more comfortable with having an 8/9k hardcore ad fleecing them.

Well they get 18/19 k every home game anyway so hardly groundbreaking given they have over 15k ST holders. Adult ST behind goal like BBE was about 299, ours 429. Not rocket science.

Riverside i'm sure is at least.

gooz is never far out so we'll roll with his/her figures.

Think he's out just due to being totally out on his feet hes been flogged something rotten in recent times. Poor planning but no point playing him if he has nothing in the tank.

Szmods has been looking increasingly knackered for weeks and as i and many said on here there should have been a lot of fresh legs started at Saints. JDT leaves a lot to be desired with things like this. Hopefully Ennis pulls his finger out the 45 mins he might get a run out !

Yes if they told him to do something he'd have to obviously and nobody can magic 15k season ticket holders at top 8 prices out of thin air. However it is also the CEO and boards job to present, push and nigh on demand things of the owners in order to push the club forwards. They are the people on the ground here the so called heartbeat of the club whilst the ownership is thousands of miles away with eyes mostly on other things. Do they ever do that ? Highly unlikely and that is also a big part of the problem here.

Exactly and way beyond the lazy clueless gravy train riders, i'm sure though if a fans group offered to do it all for them they'd be all over it ! First thing springs to mind at upstairs at Ewood though is hey we can save £100 quid on this box ticking virtue signalling exercise. Getting a donation from the EFL in the process and not bothering about reducing a small crowd to a tiny one because it's covered. Hey Mrs D look we saved X on the Cambridge game but the takings were still Y .

To be honest i hadn't even seen you post on the subject if you made one so maybe if you say something you know yourself might be provocative then don't say it if you're bothered about a response. Which that wasn't. Anyway, the ones i referred to have been numerous on social media and usually from the young element who never seem to understand their own fanbase. 'No excuse not to fill Ewood' 'Surely we've sold 20k so far..' 'People always moaning about price but still won't come' etc etc Missing the point that never seems to dawn the GROUND IS AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN TOO BIG for a town this size not hosting Prem football with added thousands of away fans every game. That is what it was built for but those days are history, permanently i'd say. Look at the size of places like Nottingham, Coventry, Leics, Derby then look at the size of their grounds, same as ours more or less. Look at Preston, Bumley, Bolton, Wigan, Watford and so on, there's a reason they are that size.

Most clubs our size in similar towns don't have a stadium the size of Ewood and as said above it's always the perception of everyone else that ends up slagging off the support. Lets be honest a lot of football fans especially in certain places ( and some of our own).are thick as mince so a 15k crowd at second tier Rovers is considered good by most of us yet shite by everyone else because it's still 'half empty'. People have the perception of us as a similar sized club to Boro. Derby, Norwich etc but because we rarely get similar numbers it's because of shit support. They couldn't be further from the actual truth given the area, demographics, economy etc. It's a cross we'll always have to bear but to see some of our own so called fans chiming in as well just shows what we are up against. 5 thousand extra buyers means it's a roaring success and covers any loss of revenue that the 1.5/2k only who would pitch up normally at cat B prices.

It's a sign of things to come we absolutely know that if they think they can save a few quid in staff/ink/paper money every game by going digi under the BS 'saving the planet' guise they will do. Even if it costs even more fans because they seem to have concluded we have a certain income level and it's ALL about continual cost reduction within that level. Lose more regulars but put ticket prices up again or make more games cat A to cover it, that's the thinking. A bumper crowd v Watford albeit at reduced rates allows for a farcical experiment v Cambridge and a guaranteed smaller gate.

It's that Sheff Weds lad who is the reporter now he's always using 'Blackburn' in his reports. Why the hell they can't actually find a local reporter to do the job is bizarre but probably done on purpose.