The info I had (and they've been pretty solid with everything they've passed me) is that JDT was happy for Buckley to leave on loan. Reading between the lines, that might have been on the condition that Burke also came in on loan. And since that didn't happen, he's now taking the 'I never wanted Buckley to leave' stance. He has however always been very reactive/proactive in terms of replacing an underperforming player. After Plymouth, you'd expect that Pears has to sit on the bench.

Exactly this. As the stats show, we’ve spent - by far - the majority of our time in the top tier.

So throwing £16m in the bin for no reason or benefit? Sorry, not seeing the logic behind this one.

It would have been absolute madness to sell him at that point. He was on fire, we were pushing for promotion and there was nothing to suggest that he’d have a pretty torrid second half of the season. Hindsight is wonderful, but the fallout from selling him at that point would have been worse than us letting him eventually walk away for free.

I was led to believe that the meeting was a court case - but I wasn't able to find anything online to confirm either way and wasn't given the specifics of the case.

No, it didn't - it was scheduled for then, but it was postponed. Not heard about a rescheduled date yet.

You'd be surprised at how many handsomely-paid people are ineffective communicators.

Well, hopefully - but that has always been my major concern with any potential sale of the club. Are Venky’s going to just write off that amount of money? If not, we’ll likely never have different owners (unless one of us wins the Euro Millions on a triple rollover week).

I like GB and todays interview has done nothing to change my opinion. He’s an effective communicator, appears to be honest and transparent and gives us something that didn’t exist before he arrived here; a strategy. In my opinion, we’re a lot better off with him being with us. I’ve seen a small number of strong opinions against him on here in the past and I’d be interested to know what’s that’s based on. And on Buckley, I was told that JDT was in full agreement with the loan. Which is interesting as everything else that the same person has told me has either happened or been confirmed, even down to GB confirming that the 3rd deadline signing was a winger from the Bundesliga (Oli Burke).

I'm sure he won't be too concerned, since his team are totally outclassing the opposition and will walk off the pitch as winners. Be quite nice if he scored, to shove it back up the home fans' arses.

Bellingham has been good, but so has Foden. If the other lads were on his wavelength, we score at least another 2 in that half.

1-0. I know it's hard to judge in a friendly and against such poor opposition, but we've looked pretty decent so far.

Based on the time we spent there under the incumbent owners, I'm not too sure about that. If Venky's wanted to make coin from the club, promotion is by far and away their best option.

Similarly, no Rovers fan would call us 'Blackburn'. If you refer to Rovers in a football sense, very few are going to think you're talking about Doncaster, Bristol or Forest Green, to be fair.

Definitely knows where the goal is. Debut goal on Sat would be amazing 👍

I mentally zoned out at the point of us chasing a win at 1-1, we brought off Bellingham and Maddison and left on Henderson. Incredible.

I think the implication by the club was that he was never effectively managed by Plymouth, hence the recurrent injuries - and if he's a drinker, that would absolutely have not helped at all. No excuse, if you're a professional sportsman. My hope is that the staff at Brockhall can get him in shape and strengthened in ways that he's never been. Looks a player from the glimpses we've seen of him so far.

The person answering the questions is the reporter, not JDT - so the reporter not knowing for certain isn't a massive surprise, to be fair. Regarding JDT's contract situation, I was told that there was some discussion about a new one a number of weeks ago - but if it happened, it would have been easier for either party to walk away. No idea if it's live / dropped / etc.

Really expect Moran to become a big player for us this season. He'll be more of an Elliott than a Morton. Encouraging for Gilsenan as well, very confident penalty.

I don’t believe the whole ‘tax’ thing was a legitimate concern for the club - think it was the red tops who brought that into play for us. Possibly got wind of something happening over there and 1+1=3. One element of this, from the info that was passed a number of weeks ago, is that Venky’s were aware that this investigation/process would be happening since Jan/Feb of this year. Club revenue was protected in the subsequent months by things like EFL money, season tickets, etc. So it only became an operational issue to us around the time when the sponsorship deal was put into place.

I think they did, to be fair - along with a number of other local charities.

Did you manage to meet with SW recently, btw Glen? Be interested to hear his take on the situation. He gave the briefest of hints in his recent BBC interview, as did GB on deadline day ('geopolitical issues').

This is my opinion also. The Gov't restrictions seems to be a perfect reason for Venky's to say 'you need to be less reliant on our funding moving forward'. So it leaves us in a bit of limbo; they stick around, but we never quite have enough funds to do anything other than tread water.

Garrett was due to go out to cover the Moran in, but the loan deal fell through. We had to get one body out of the door before the window closed - and it ended up being Buckley.

Buckley was the 'out' to the Moran 'in'.