When I first heard we'd bought him, I thought that was what we'd offered and had accepted.

Have we?!?

Not sure I'd agree with this. I think this is the weaker of this week's two away games so I'd be inclined to tweak the team, then return to the "First XI" for the away to Brizzle Rovers on Saturday.

Is there NObody connected with the club or the Community Trust who can refurbish this bench so that it's a proper commemoration of one of the best players to wear blue and white in the last quarter or the 20th Century? Come on, Venky's; you bought us lock, stock and barrel. If you bought a Premier League club - which we were, before you sacked Big Sam and replaced him with that nonentity whose name I choose not to repeat - you also bought our history. It surely wouldn't break your bank to refurbish this bench commemorating one of our most popular players of the last quarter of the 20th Century.

At least Osgood had one thing to be remembered for!!?

Spot on, Parson. But there ought to be a condition of membership on here preventing members reminding other members how old we, and our heroes from the late 50s/early 60s, now are! If I'm 73, I suppose Mike England must be 79. I don't - obvs. - know about him; but I still have the mentality of a fan who was 18/19 which was when he was in his pomp with us. I just hope the younger ones on here are still raving about Tosin in about 2075!!

A proper football manager. RIP. The next Home game will be a real test of the current regime. If there's: no black armbands on the team's sleeves; no minute's silence - none of this minute's applause malarky - and no proper appreciation in the match programme of Jim and what he did for This Great Club Of Ours in more financially-straightened times before Uncle Jack's era, then it will speak volumes - to this fan at least - about what care-less custodians we have of our traditions.

Well, if you are, my fellow-Riversider, you aren't the only one. The last item of clothing I bought from the club shop two or three years ago was a cheap 'n' nasty grey t-shirt with a derivative design which I was ashamed to wear after its initial outing. It now functions, during winter months only, as a vest, although to be honest, if Mrs. m1st were still alive, she'd probably have cut it up for dusters long ago. So my question to whoever has responsibility for purchasing items to go on sale is, "Do you not realise that the fans who buy club-related clothing are putting their money into the words of "Rovers till I die."? We're saying, 'This is MY club and I'm proud/Rovers-daft* enough to want to be identified with it.' " I was silly enough at the end of a holiday in N. Ireland last year to forget to put my BRFC [Nike] rain jacket back in my suitcase. The next Home game Saturday, I went into the club shop to get the Umbro equivalent, only to be told that they don't stock anything like that any more. Well, why ever not? Items like that say we want to be identified as Rovers' fans.' I've had enough occasions when on holiday & wearing some - decent-quality - Rovers' clothing, to have had 'exiles' recognise the badge and start conversations about This Great Club Of Ours. Probably my best experience was when visiting a Dingle-supporting schoolmate from 60+ years ago in New Zealand in 2011. I was in a bar in Queenstown when the badge on my sweater was recognised by a number of New Zealanders who recognised the club badge which their country's Captain had worn. I didn't have to buy a pint for the rest of the evening!?? * Delete as appropriate.

By the way, Pocchetino's available at the moment, isn't he?!?? Just saying!?

Very thoughtful of you, Ww; but it'd mean I'd be further back in the queue at the corner of Kidder Street for the bus to Bolton!?

My godson's accepted my subtle[?!] hint some months ago about Matt Jansen's memoir for Christmas. He'll be getting chapter and verse on this for my birthday next March!

Oh no-o-o, Wegerleswiggle; we can't have that!! Not after I've confessed to leaving on 75 mins!!?

Up to a point, martonrover. Because I no longer drive, I tend to leave Ewood about 10-15 minutes before the end of the game so that I can get a bus to Bolton - the first leg of my journey home - before Bolton Road is closed to traffic. Increasingly, it feels like common sense to have left early - not only am I likely to get home a bit sooner, but I won't really be missing anything by doing so. And yet; and yet; within this 73-year-old frame, beats the heart of the 7-year-old who: was born in Blackpool to a couple of Blackburners; was dead proud at that age to wear a blue and white replica shirt among all the tangerine; and will be, in the words of the song that always has a lump in my throat each time I join in, "Rovers till I die". But I fear that pragmatism will win. At the moment, it's 60/40 on me not renewing my season ticket because the team Mowbray puts out seem to me an unexciting amalgam of footballers, usually with several playing out of position, rather than their proper - best - positon. And in turn that seems to be because the manager - the buck stops with you, Mowbray - has signed: few defenders so that the defence is always one injury away from being a real disaster zone; a plethora of midfielders but no proper wingers to feed our strikers who are a pale shadow of the attack Uncle Jack bought us. I think you're right, martonrover, when you talk about the fire in Warnock's belly. But, personally, I think that signing him as manager - even if he could be induced to come here - would only lead to a temporary improvement in our present situation at best. I certainly don't think he could build a team with a reasonable chance of avoiding a return to the Championship after one season, as Chris Wilder seems to have done at Sheffield United or - excuse my language - as Dyche has done with That Lot down the M65. I've previously expressed the opinion that Damien Johnson ought to be given a chance. Given the way the team - our team - are floundering at the moment, what have we to lose?

Nobbut a lad compared with Warnock & Hodgson, then!!?

Is Bennett really 69? That could explain a lot; if he is, he should have been pensioned off years ago Come to think of it, even if . . .

I'm still catching up on the last 10 days' posts on this thread. Apologies, Mark; hope you'll accept my slight amendment to your post from yesterday. We care; if only the owners and management cared as much, our club perhaps wouldn't be so close to staring into the abyss.

I'm currently going through my traditional reaction to our alleged 'form'. What I do, masochist that I am, is to avoid this Board for two or three weeks at a time, then binge on this thread. Waiting for the goals from Leeds yesterday to be shown on Quest today, I was taken by the comments Tony Pulis made about the Barnsley (now there's a 'Must-win' game, if ever there was one, coming up!) v. Stoke City game. He observed that Michael O'Neill had made half a dozen changes in the Stoke City side despite having only had one, very brief, training session since his appointment and that, as a result, Stoke's players on the pitch were all playing in their correct positions. Pulis has apparently seen several of their games this season and said that yesterday for the first time that he had seen them this season, the players looked comfortable in the way they were playing. My first thought on hearing that was to wonder if TM heard that observation and, if he had, did it make him think about his insistence, partly - largely? -as a result of his dealings in the transfer market, on shoe-horning several of our players into positions where they aren't comfortable? Even if he heard Pulis' remark, we all know - please, God, prove me wrong! - that he is bullet-proof as far as our owners are concerned. All we can pray for now is that he does the decent thing and resign. Apologies if anyone has made a similar comment on pp. 105-113 of this thread; I think I'm only up to p. 104 and Chaddy's comment gave me a peg to hang my thoughts on.

PS: I've ticked that he won't be gone after today. That's only because I don't think our owners care about our club as much as we do.

I, too, was out all afternoon. Got home about 4.35 to find we were 3-2 down to the Knobbers; "Not too bad", I thought, having been at Deepdale last season. Then I discovered that we'd actually been 2-0 up - and after 11 minutes, too - and away, to the lesser of our two traditional rivals in my eyes, anyway. Then - just now, in fact: I'm an old fogey; I don't 'do' social media - I've seen the goals from Deepdale on Quest. Was that our 6' 5" tall loaned goalkeeper fannying around for their first? And was that our undroppable Captain - first name on the teamsheet: Bennett and 10 others? - conceding a penalty on the second consecutive Saturday? On another thread on here not too long ago, I referred to an article in The Times on the day we played Newcastle United in the 3rd Round of last season's F.A. Cup. I read the article on the train up to St. James' Park; it showed what a nice - and loyal - bloke our manager is to all members of his staff. And I thought, "Ahh!" Then, as I recently posted on another thread, Neil Harris raised the bar in the 'Championship Managers as decent blokes' category by resigning as Millwall's manager because he felt he could take them no further. If our present manager believes his own publicity - as, to be fair, I used to - that he's one of football's nice guys, why on earth doesn't he do the decent thing and follow Neil Harris's example?

But, Joe; 'if' is a very big word. Specially when leading into that scenario. Were it to happen, it would have to the start of a much improved set of results which, to be honest, can't be expected from the current set-up.

I'm reading this thread from start to finish on Wednesday morning - and a sobering read it is, too. It seems to be morphing into the one about TM's future at our club which, in emails to a former schoolmate of mine who lives in New Zealand and has always supported "the b'stards in claret & blue", I always call "Lancashire's Most Historic Club". So I'll say this here while my anger/disappointment at last night's result is still fresh. I used to say that TM was "a 2nd half manager" because we seemed to play much better in the 2nd half of games, especially in League One. It took a long time for me to realise that, although that may have been true, the proper way to look at it is to say that he's "yesterday's man-ager." (Did you see what I did there?!?) He was - often only marginally - improving in the 2nd half of games the situation that his team selection & tactics for the 1st half had brought about. I agree that his time as manager is up - football management seems these days to be a younger man's game. Here I draw an analogy with Rochdale. A sequence of poor results about 2/3 through last season leading to the prospect of relegation - and a new Chairman of the Board - led to Keith Hill being sacked, despite him being the man who got them back to League One and kept them there. As an interim measure, he was replaced by a young Irish member of his backroom squad in Brian Barry-Murphy, aka BBM. Despite 'Dale being the nearest League club to my home, I rarely go to their games so I have to look at the statistics, and reports in the local paper. Somehow BBM kept them up, apparently playing a more attractive style and that seems to have carried on into this season. BBM has a pedigree in sporting management - his Dad was a celebrated Captain, then Manager, of Cork's Gaelic Games teams - which I don't know if Damian Johnson has; but for me, where my analogy falls down is in the Boardroom. Without someone willing to take what to many people locally saw as a surprising decision by sacking a manager who had brought 'Dale some of the most successful times in their history - not that TM could claim that accolade - they could have dropped back into League Two. Do Rovers have anybody in power with the balls to do that while there's still a transfer window between now and the end of the season? I don't know, but I hope there is.

One of the things that comes across about TM the man is that he's a decent caring human being. Perhaps that's the reason why he's never had major success in England. And that was one of the reasons why I was prepared to cut him some slack this season despite the litany of things - I don't need to rehearse them before this audience; you know the script as well as I do - that haven't gone the way that I, as a dyed in the wool Rovers' fan would want them to. However, Neil Harris' resignation as Millwall manager has raised the bar for 'decent caring human beings' being professional football managers. I can't see TM will following his example and resigning, but surely our owners have other sources of information than Waggott for what's going on in the world of their investment in English football. As someone who is as far from being ITK as it's possible to be, I don't see any point in suggesting names of possible successors if TM were to do the decent thing and resign because I can't imagine our owners would act on any of our suggestions. For every Danny Crowley - it looks like it hasn't taken him and his brother long to begin turning Huddersfield Town round - there's a Nathan Jones at Stoke. However, fwiw, I have more or less come round to the decision that TM's taken us as far as he can.

You're not alone, Tyrone. I'm finding that recent results are a contributory factor. This is the first time in probably a fortnight that I've visited the Board.

According to Wikipedia, he's someone who's never made it at more clubs, including non-Leaguers, than you could shake a stick at! Not sure why Chaddy posted his post.?

One of my Godsons has been sent the link so he doesn't have to email me as to what I want for Christmas!!