He's probably learned not to trust the usual opening day feeling of hope over experiences! Which usually tends to have evaporated by about 3.30 p.m.!

? Nice one!

You talking to me or Paul? Or both! ?

Apologies. As the father of two girls who are now grown up I can sympathise with your pain!. ? I do try usually not to drag a thread off topic. Hope you enjoy the result today.

Eh? We're obviously NOT going into the game with said players so strange comment. I agree with you about the possible potential of the youngsters, the question is, will this manager play them? If he does I'll be delighted. Don't usually go with the easy start / hard start analysis as you have to play everyone sometime but this could actually be a good time to catch Bournemouth. I can see us nicking a 1-1 or 2-2 draw.

Thanks for the response, I didn't accuse you of being a plant, I respect the contributions of both yourself and unleaded who both seem to have some genuine insight as to what is going on at the Club but who again seem to have very differing opinions about the same situation. As a minor aside I would say we have actually had pots of money" to chuck around in recent years but this manager in particular has largely wasted it and I also appreciate the urgency of our financial situation and the unfortunate fact that we are completely at the mercy of our often unpredictable owners. To my mind that makes success on the pitch a far more pressing necessity than if we were debt free and arguably stagnating or worse.

The fact you say you will never ever whinge and moan no matter how bad things get indicates to me that in the final analysis you couldn't really care less what happens to the Club. But hey ho. I'm sure no-one else wants to carry on reading you insulting my point of view and me being forced to respond or us two sniping at each other. New season ahead, Let's see what the season brings and I rather suspect it won't be the the last time we disagree over the next 12 months.

Come off it , does he heck. If he sets a target of automatic promotion and fails to meet it, he potentially gets the sack before he's on Premier league wages. Far better to try and muddle on indefinitely until its time to retire trying to con people into thinking there's a slow build or long term plan. Since we got promoted, how many lrime age established Championship level players has he brought in to go straight into the first team? Arguably none. That tells you all you need to know about his intentions imo.

I watched my first Rovers game at Ewood against Sundererland the end of 1970 at the age of nearly 7 in the season when we got relegated for the first time ever. We lost that game 1-0 and it should have put me off for ever but for some reason I've been strangely hooked ever since. Back in the day when we genuinely had no money, we had managers like Furphy, Lee and Kendall who would knock the spots of Mowbray. The current incumbent isn't in the same League. Subsequently we had Don Mackay who again had to make do on relatively limited resources but again was a vastly superior manager to Mowbray imo. Got us into the play offs several times but we didn't quite make it. That wasn't good enough for Jack when he came in, poor old Don couldn't attract the top players so King Kenny was brought in. The following 3 and a half years were history. In later years I was invited to write a fans piece in the LT for a couple of years after our promotion back to the Premier League under Souness and the Worthington Cup win. I was very critical about various things about the purchase of Grabbi, the manager himself and the general direction the Club was heading in. Although in my view hindsight proved me right, this earned a lot of flak from various quarters at the time (particularly my old mate USA Blue). So here we are all these years on after all that and personally I haven't particularly enjoyed following Rovers since Mark Hughes was here. There was the brief relief of a promotion from League 1 which you might argue we shouldn't have been in in the first place given we've been under the control of successive billionaire owners for the last 20 years. I note from one of your previous postings that you started following us in 1994/5. I do suspect you're a Club plant who only pops up at transfer window time to promote the Company line but even if not and you're genuine I think you'd have a better perspective of what is and is not possible with limited resources had you been a fan pre Jack.

Not at all. Play Wharton.

Please sign him before tomorrow's game!

No mention of medicals from either Sharpe or Mowbray in the LT article outlining the collapse of both deals but fair enough if you've seen it elsewhere.

That is exactly how it reads Parson, there is no indication that a non Corporate punter will definitely be able to get a seat in JW upper at all. What were the previous arrangements for people who had a deal entitling them to use the lounge then watch the game from the JW? Were they dotted about everywhere or put in the posher seats in the middle? Can't for the life of me see why there's any need to drastically change what was done previously as Corporate demand will drop off a cliff I'd imagine.

I know 50p head Derek will probably get the nod alongside Lenihan tomorrow but that sort of comment really infuriates me. Wharton has gone out on loan for experience and done all that can be asked of him in the meantime yet people still claim he's unproven. "Can't pick him he's unproven". Yet he can't prove himself for the very same reason that the manager won't pick him! And on and on we go. Wharton can't win.

Were medicals done? If you're on about Kipre and Ayala I didn't think either deal reached anywhere near that stage, just "we thought we had an agreement with the player" etc.

What do you mean, so what if he develops into a top keeper? Many of us thought that was a given. Should we flog Nyambe, Lenham, Travis and Armstrong for 3 .million quid a piece as well? So what if they develop into top players!! So to summarise, we sold our first choice keeper for a knockdown fee without sourcing a replacement first, under estimated the difficulty in getting a decent replacement and allegedly missed out on our targets, ended up with Brighton's fourth choice keeper on loan who is quite possibly the worst professional goalie ever to don a pair of gloves and a little over 12 months later one of the six biggest Clubs in the Country is after our original keeper for 3x what we offloaded him for. And you can't see a problem with that? I know your role on here is to pop up every transfer window and praise everything that happens at the Club and try and get as many people onside as possible but that's stretching it a bit even by your standards.

Bell's much better at LB than Williams for me as well and he isn't the best to put it mildly.

Just catching up on this topic late again so apologies to everyone. Well said Parson. I think if any final confirmation Waggott is an absolute imbecile is needed this is it. For the last few seasons I've been slumming it in the Riverside to sit with a friend but my spiritual home has always been JW upper as for around 45 years before that I also viewed from either the old Nuttall Street stand or JW upper. I think it's absolutely appalling that you can even contemplate treating longstanding ST holders like this. You always get the impression with Waggott even pre Covid that his dream scenario would be to flog 2,000 season tickets at £1500 a pop rather than sell 10k at £300 each and mothball 90% of the ground which let us not forget is Jack Walker's Ewood Park. Hope that if there is a Fans Forum coming up soon the members can talk a modicum of sense into him. You also sense that in the unlikely event that 10k fans wanted season tickets he'd be absolutely gutted if he had to open all 4 stands to dot everyone about evenly. I hope it happens if only to piss him off. John, (only2 garners) any thoughts on this and have these proposals been before the Forum already? If so, what was the reaction?

We already have Davenport who TM signed 2 years ago and has barely used, how many young midfielders we aren't going to use do we actually need? Reassuring to hear good old Tony doesn't like wasting the owners money though.......

If it goes through, typical Mowbray, a bit of tinkering round the edges, a bit of window dressing as opposed to someone to go straight into the first team and thereby disrupt the core squad.

Chaddy apart, can't believe some are still trying to justify the Raya sale on the basis we might receive a sell on clause if he moves to Arsenal! The fact that such a big Club appear to be in for him a little more than 12 months after Mowbray scapegoated him, left him out of the side in favour of the useless Leutwiler, and sold him for peanuts just proves what a bad judge of a player's ability Mowbray is. As regards the money we got for him, if Brentford stand firm and push the deal up to something around the £15m mark we'll receive almost as much in add ons as we did for selling him! Which again only serves to underline what a calamitous bollock we dropped. On the loyalty issue I think ideally I'd prefer to see Raya complete at least one more season in the Championship with Brentford but to be fair to him he has no idea if a Club the size of Arsenal are ever going to come knocking again. It's very unlikely Liverpool, City or Manure are going to need a keeper in the foreseeable, Chelsea are apparently closing in on someone from Rennes so that only really leaves Spurs in this Country as a similar option. The chance may never come again. If he was talking about possibly moving to say Crystal Palace then that would be a slightly different debate but again, it would be hard to turn down a move from the Champuonship to the Premier League.

Very good! ?

Evans has been crap for eight seasons and isn't going to change now. Puts in a good shift for Ireland though, apparently.

Exactly. If he came in and we started winning games he'd be one of the lads in no time. Be on TOWIE with Dack and his missus before we know it. We won't even express an interest and Warnock will probably sign him because he knows what it takes to get a Club promoted from the Championship.

Well if you'd rather watch Evans pass the ball two yards sideways and backwards and Johnson barely break into a sweat that's up to you I suppose.