I was thinking Gareth Bale. If Cardiff can go in for him. ......

Transfer window opened on June 10th but most deals won't go through until July 1st. Fixture list - Thursday June 23rd.

Promising appointment in theory. Hope he does well. Not sure how "a culture of giving everything to the Club" ties in with keeping on Lowe/Benson etc but hopefully the new performance director will see them off in short order. They're certainly all talking a great game and singing off the same hymn sheet at this stage. Let's see if the reality matches the spiel!

Not until June 30th. We're paying Mowbray to mow the lawn.

What, you mean it was a joke? 😕

He didn't walk out mid season I don't think. Their season ends in December and he walked out after 2 successive League titles. The fact he walked out of that successful scenario to then be out of work for 6 months for no apparent reason would be my main area of concern though.

Hence my refusal to believe JDT plus his own choice of assistant would be any form of downgrade. If it turns out I'm wrong, so be it.

I think he was out of work when we appointed him though.

We finished 8th with Venky's + Swag + a washed up disinterested manager + Venus + said underwhel.ing coaches though so I refuse to believe JDT plus an assistant if he brings one in will be any sort of downgrade on that. What will potentially kill us is losing six established first teamers plus Poveda but you would hope an improvement in the standard of coaching would offset that.

If it's correct, some easy money to be had on SkyBet at 4/6.

Is there such a thing?

I've made my views on this fairly clear already I think. I'd be fairly apoplectic at what I would regard as another "Mowbray Mark 2 appointment" such as Pardew or Adkins. JDT would be far from my first choice but is different enough to pique the interest slightly. As far as my view on the owners went I'd have to see how JDT did before passing comment, at this stage it neither improves nor worsens my view of them.

Agree entirely. They never really seem to have understood the importance of hiring the best manager they can possibly get, probably assuming it's a job anyone can do give or take so why pay over the odds? A completely false economy in the general scheme of things. This insistence on Lowe Johnson and Benson staying (if true) takes it to a whole new level. If Waggott had had anything about him he should have put his foot down from the off and told them we wouldn't get a top class candidate unless they were allowed to bring in their own staff.

Great post. My mate nagged/shamed me into getting my season ticket in the pub on Friday night. I was going to leave it and see who we appointed originally.

I would love for that to happen if only to see Gav's reaction.

I'm told he'd be amenable to an approach as well.

No Greg Coar has apparently just left to go to Wigan and is apparently being replaced by some guy coming in from Bournemouth.

Not hard to imagine what scuppered discussions at an early stage there - Lowe, Johnson and Benson.

And you won't take on board my point that the owners were probably sold a pup by Waggott initially but if we accept that "He can only do anything with the owners permission" it is most likely that it was they who nipped it in the bud.

Do you not think they were sold a shiny new vision of something that couldnt actually be done in practice though? If it was what the owners wanted why do you think it was scrapped when it was? Would have been nothing stopping it getting to the latter stages of the process at least.

That's the worry. Won't feel secure on that front until Waggott has gone.

Big assumption there on the strength of one interview that Broughton will automatically be a huge success and is the man to transform our fortunes and will only be thwarted by machiavellian owners. He might be a success but could just as easily turn out to be a liability as an asset. Still doesn't do any harm to get your feet under the table ASAP with whoever is in Authority at Ewood at any given time does it?

Fair point.

Great post overall, but you seem to have an unbelievably rosy view of Steve Waggott. I don't know what his secret is, but he seems to have this remarkable knack of convincincing people who have met him in person that he is an all round good egg who has the interests of the Club at heart. I'm simply not having it. The crap food is symptomatic of his apparent penny pinching attitude but is a relatively minor issue. It's under his stewardship that affordable seating was scrapped. It's under his stewardship that prices were raised by up to 25% during a pandemic for a season where no-one could attend. It was him that was involved in Coventry City's attempt to flog their training ground when he was there. You can't put any blame on our owners for that. Therefore it defies logic to think that it wasn't him that was the driving force behind a similar attempt here and indeed he openly admitted that he was the one driving the idea. The scheme here was based on the fraudulent premise that a Category One Academy could be housed in a facility and on a site half the size of the existing ones. I wonder how much he cost the Club with the aborted scheme once a few inconvenient home truths were brought to light? Prices continue to rise, every pricing initiative that comes out of the Club is a near disaster and remedial steps to mitigate the damage are only taken once people like those silly posh QEGS lads running round in their rolled up trousers with their secret handshakes, or yourselves on the Trust, take them to task. Why can't anyone at the Club get something right first time round for once? He had essentially one job to do this season just gone - get Lenihan, Nyambe and Rothwell signed up to new contracts. 100% failure rate in that respect seemingly. The managerial search has been an absolute embarrassment and seems to have been designed to put off any better candidates. With the benefit of hindsight it would obviously have been far better to replace Waggott before Mowbray and have someone vaguely competent conducting the search. In summary, everything he has touched since he's been at the Club has been a disaster. But it's OK it seems because it appears he's extremely attentive and wants to help. (But never does.)

The bookies odds (I know I know) seem to find it reasonably hard to separate JDT and Deila (who seemingly is off to Standard Liege so for what it's worth, they must not regard JDT as anything approaching a certainty yet. What puzzles me about JDT is why he left Malmo after two successful title winning years and has subsequently been out of work for 6 months. Does anyone know the circumstances of him leaving? Was the break orchestrated by the Club or him? If the latter, did he have a better job lined up which never materialised or did he just fancy a break from football?