Ha ha. So the Old Firm is going to be over shadowed by "little" Burnley v Blackburn". Will be interesting to get the viewing figures on that head to head fixture clash.

The value of the players of Chelsea in the market is an utterly abstract concept- they aren't going anywhere unless Chelsea want them to so resale values are utterly theoretical. The Chelsea equation is: £200m invested in players (now he has got the quality he wants, his activity in the market will be at a much lower replenishment level) plus £70m a year wages yields on a conservative basis £5m a year Prem prize money over what they would have earned anyway £5m a year more in TV rights income £5m a year more in Chelsea's own media interests £15m a year more from Champs League Qualification £12m a year shirt sponsorship (deal just done) £20m a year stadium sponsorship (under negotiation) £40m a year more in merchandising Not the greatest return but it will wash its face. Then add the capital appreciation of land and enterprise values, and Abramovich is looking at a massive return on his investment in Chelsea, now and into the foreseeable future. What Mourinho has done is take advantage of the security blanket Chelsea gives to any its non-druggy players to engender a loyalty and fierce passion towards the club and each other that is awesome.

Bazzathe great, I suggest you read my post on the subject then you will realise why Abramovich is on a win-win-win-win with Chelsea and will only bow out if someone offers him well north of a billion for the club. Just to help you, each one of those £2m salaries are 2.5 days' interest income for him. All the people he wants to impress are mad keen football fans and thanks to Ken Bates, Chelski have 15 of the most luxuriously appointed corporate boxes anywhere in any sport. Those boxes are full of Russians/Abramovich's guests for every game. That facility alone is worth a fortunne to the guy. Abramovich is in it for a much longer haul than your average fan director and the impact he will have on English soccer is only just beginning.

Will Boro turn up for this one?

Let's leave the theatre of the absurd and return to something closer to reality. A couple of weeks ago, I suggested Chelsea's routine 2-1 win at OT was the iconic passing of an old era and the start of the new. Reading this report, perhaps I picked the wrong match as the icon! What with The Times waxing lyrical about nudity as a sign of strength (a propos Chelsea returning bare chested to the Ewood dressing room), and the more appropriate parallels being drawn between Ewood two nights ago and Goodison in April '95, maybe Wednesday night's game is the one for the myths and history books?

Good point drog. But will anyone do it as effectively as the Rovers?

Arsenal will be incredibly well placed if they register their first team as an Academy and continue their remarkable ability of picking up prodigiously talented teenagers from around the world for the odd million or two.

Every member of the greatest team selected so far plied their trade for Rovers in the top league across the near 130 years of the club's illustrious history. Most won at least one major honour whilst with Rovers (or a runners-up medal in the case of Douglas and Clayton) and for many, Rovers was the only club with whom they won anything (and that for the next three weeks still goes for Damien Duff ). More poignantly, everyone of them were not only internationals but multiple cap winners and several captained their respective country. So why should we break this record and elect a player who never won a cap, never collected more than a Full Members Cup winners medal and never once played at the highest level? I'll tell you why- Simon Garner is quite simply a legend and a player whose feat in being the club's leading goal scorer with a relatively modest sub-200 total of goals will nevertheless be unlikely to be beaten for many years, if ever. Not only was he a goal scorer but Garns was ever a grafter and always popular with the crowd from the day as a teenager he buried a chance in the Anglo-Scottish Cup to mark his first goal for the Rovers to the day he walked out as a non-playing member of the play off promotion winning side. Garner was well capable of amazing single handed scoring feats- I'll never forget shaking hands with him on the pitch before a game against Derby and shaking hands again two hours later in the 100 Club after he had scored all five in a one man 5-1 demolition "derby". There was a 4 against Sunderland and quite a few hattricks including the three great strikes against Pompey away in a recovery from two down to win 4-2. (Poor Neil Webb- he scored three times to take the lead for Pompey against Rovers that season and Rovers took all six points!) Of course the hattrick against Man City when the Darwen End was covered in discarded inflatable bananas brought by the fans of all-conquering City could have been the most joyous day of all as we thrashed them 4-0 and the new goal scoring record was set but it was for ever over-shadowed by the events at Hillsborough. It wasn't just the routine second or third division games in which Garner scored but he made a speciality of scoring against top flight opposition whenever we drew them in the Cup. Twice in different seasons he put the Rovers into the lead against Liverpool at Ewood- one a truly stupendous swivel and strike from a corner. Away at QPR, he streaked away from the defence in a way that became a Shearer trade mark to beat Phil Parkes with a curling daisy cutter on his near post to give us yet another lead we failed to protect. For me the greatest Garner performance came in a League Cup game at Ipswich when Rovers were so badly hit by injuries a postponement was requested but denied. With only eight fully fit players Rovers took on the UEFA Cup holders with Thyssen, Mariner and Wark (who was to score a hattrick) in the side. More to the point, Garner was facing the two England central defenders- Terry Butcher and Russel Osman with one of the best keepers around, Cooper, in goal behind them. Nothing daunted, Garns twice received the ball with his back to goal, comprehensively turned and went past both Butcher and Osman, beat the Ipswich defence and thrashed the ball past Cooper from about 15 yards out. Even in the second half after Ipswich had pulled the two goal deficit back to 2-2, Garner was not done and he again beat Osman all-ends up to get into position to strike a blistering shot which Cooper parried onto the post. The ball returned kindly to Garner who rather than going for glory as a recovered Osman blocked his sight on goal, precisely and deliberately passed the ball ten yards sideways across the box to an unmarked Windy Miller who just as precisely passed the ball just inside the post with Cooper unable to recover the ground. 2-3 became 4-3 to the home side but that remains one of my favourite Rovers memories. Absolutely magnificent stuff- and I am sure there were other goals against top flight opposition in the Full Members, League and FA Cups I haven't remembered. Although Garner gathered his greatest haul of goals against Derby County (12 in all down the years) it was against Burnley that he was unnerringly the master executioner. From a stunning 25 yard blast with which he put Rovers into the lead the last time the dingles won at Ewood to the tap in which completed the double at t'Turf, Garner just loved scoring against the dingles. For many years, the dingles were in the outer darknesses of football but Garns crossed their paths again in his later days- scoring with glee for West Brom and Wycombe against them to rub in the old emnity. There are great contenders for the second spot- goal machines Southworth and Briggs, mercurial McEvoy, the unsurpassed talents of McKenzie and in recent times Newell and Sutton who were technically the equal of any strikers but the heart, overwhelmingly, and the head, with justification, says a list of Rovers greats would look as odd without Garner as it would with England, Clayton or Douglas missing.

There is a massive misunderstanding about Abramovich and Chelsea in those last few posts: 1) Abramovich is living in an expensive pad in Chelsea and in full control of his assets. Some of the other oligarchs are rotting in jail stripped of their assets. So, Chelsea is an insurance policy against Putin- just imagine the media frenzy which Abramovich could whip up if the Russians were to apprehend him. 2) Man U was a plc trading at the top of its value. Abramovich bought a nearly bankrupt club sitting on massive land values. He took it private so nobody knows what he actually paid to discharge the Chelsea debts. I would be surprised if everyone got 100p in the £1. Now he is building a sporting brand that by-passes rather than competes with Man U, Real or Juve- which happens to be sitting in the middle of the richest city in Europe. So, Chelsea is an investment. Abramovich is in this to sell when he wants at a profit and ignore the losses last year- that is all part of the investment (including the salaries- there is not a club on earth that can afford to poach a Chelsea player). 3) He is having fun and indulging his favourite pastime- winning.

I think the difference is that we signed the most important player in the Birmingham team in the hope that Savage's drive would help turn the unfulfilled potential that was Ferguson into the most important player in our team. That's why our raid on Brum hurts them so much and we can be relatively sanguine about the loss of Ferguson. Even though the profit they made on Savage was about the same size as the loss we are making on Ferguson.

London Evening Standard report says Rovers tested Chelsea more than any other side this season.

It's Mourinho criticising Rovers, not Oliver Holt. Don't think Holt wrote the report for Mourinho then issued it under his own by-line. Anyway, Mourinho is not that uncomplimentary to Rovers if you take his comments as a whole- in fact I'd say begrudging respect creeps into a moan about the fact we roughed 'em up, might have injured Robben and others and could easilly have seen Makelele and Terry red carded (sod the notion of admirable self-control referred to by Holt).

Glad you cleared that up Tris- I was wondering about my eye sight! Did anyone else find the pattern on the Chelsea shirts a bit too similar to our's when looked at from three quarter angle? With the bright lights dimming the intensity of our blue, I confused the shirts on occaisions whilst watching on TV. Don't know what it looked like at Ewood.

Quite probably Mokoena will be the skipper of a country in the World Cup Finals. Unlike....

A realistic dingle. It really brings home how we are going to have to keep it tight at t'Turf.

I am not going to excuse Souness' tactical ineptitude but 1) Ferguson was not at Rovers for two years. Obviously you see him as decent and honourable but he refused to play and ratted out after 16 months cheating us out of a couple of million in the process. 2) During those 16 months he spent 6 of them injured and receiving the highest quality medical treatment 3) Ferguson is a very inadequate tackler who also ducks out of the way when the ball is blasted at him. Those deficiencies don't matter in the SPL which is why he is happy back home playing "behind the other midfielders". He sadly was not up to the task of playing there in the Premiership. 4) You played a team 7 places below you tonight. Competitive wasn't it?

Dear me, you obviously never went to the old Den then. That could go from terrifying to high comedy in a split second- and back again. Never forget when Millwall were champions of the old second division, we went there and won 4-1 to secure our play-off place. At the final whistle, the Millwall hoards scaled their fencing and headed straight towards our pen in the corner. They raced to the 6 yard box then stopped and applauded the Rovers' fans! Boy was I glad Don MacKay had made a point of stroking the giant cuddly toy lion they'd stuck in the centre circle before the game to huge cheers from the locals.

After tonight's performance, I think we will givew it a good go and will probably be the better side. But we will lose 1-0.

Completely agree with Paul's post. We gave Chelsea a real fright tonight- if you doubt that, look at the way they celebrated at the end of the game- Mourinho was more hyper than when he won the European Cup. Magnificent performance by the Rovers- full of competitive spirit but no lack of quality work as well. There were times when Chelsea threatened to play their slick stuff but whenever that occured, Savage was in their face and back we'd come holding the ball well. Mokoena on tonight's evidence is a great signing. Matteo played well. Reservations- Sorry Brad but that goal was straight at and through you and the look on your face after it went in said you knew you should have saved it. Nelsen looked a touch short of the pace but did his job well when he was able to stand strong. Thompson's passing- oh dear. We shouldn't even bother trying to cross- we (Emo) cannot. Dickov never looked like scoring that penalty- Cech out psyched him, Savage would have scored it. I watched the game on French TPS Channel (they had a team of a rather attractive female presenter down in the JW/BBE corner and two commentators at the back of the JW) in the Scottish Bar in San Julian's, Malta. The other game they were showing was the Juve home defeat by Sampdoria in a predictably 95% empty Stadio del Alpe. Funny, the Scottish bar not showing wee Bazza making his sub appearance in Rankers' 7-1 win in the CIS my arse Cup. Nobody was remotely interested- the Scots know where the significant football is played.

The BBC preview: "Chelsea are without Scott Parker (broken foot), Ricardo Carvalho (broken toe) and Robert Huth (knee ligaments). Didier Drogba, Petr Cech, William Gallas, Arjen Robben, Paulo Ferreira, Tiago and Claude Makelele all return." gulp

This whole thing has been an utter sickener. Rovers have been punished for treating Ferguson decently and trying to retain his services. Hughes must have put his authority on the line with the Board in advising them he could retain a motivated Ferguson at Ewood and must be livid and disillusioned by what has happened. Rovers went to their "last and final" price of £6m in an effort to show Ferguson they were being reasonable then Ferguson pulled the stunt of refusing to play against Colchester. Compared with the hell Savage went through at Brum, Rovers behaved decently over Ferguson and got rooked £1m for it. Should have priced him at £8.5m as I suggested and thrown Rangers' £10m valuation of Boumsong back in their face when they moaned. At least the 50/50 on the last day would have been a higher result and closer to the amount we paid for the disloyal weakling.

Funny how I have suddenly become a massive Celtic fan.... Souness still mouthing off this morning.

Unfortunately, we were too busy being made fools of by Rangers.

After today's non-events, I think we will be very lucky to only lose 0-3. Rovers 0 Chelsea 6

With a possee of Gers fans down at Ibrox ready to welcome Bazza hame and everything done except agreement of the fee, I don't think JW will blink at 23.59 tonight.