Pears's distribution is better than Kaminski's too. Pears doesn't deserve to be dropped and is entitled to feel cheesed off if he were.

Confession time ...... this information came from Heskey himself By chance I met Heskey at the weekend when he told me that Rovers tried to sign him. Rovers offered £1 million, which Leicester accepted, but he decided to stay at his home town club because he felt he was too young at 16 to make the move. Fair enough. He went on to have a wonderful career (he's 45 now and coaching the women and kids at Leicester) during which he made more than 600 league appearances scoring 130 goals, and won 62 England caps - which he's rightly very proud of (have to say it came as a surprise that he won so many) But it got me thinking. If Heskey had joined Rovers in early 1994, is it likely that we would then have gone out and signed Chris Sutton in July of that year - at £5 million the most expensive player in English football at the time - and might the title-winning SAS strike partnership of Shearer and Sutton never have existed? Would it have been Heskey and Shearer - or HASH? It's more likely Rovers wanted him for his future potential rather than go straight in the first team but we did miss out by not signing him because when Shearer left we would have had a top-class ready-made replacement.

I learnt at the weekend that Rovers had an offer accepted for Emile Heskey in early 1994 when he was just 16 and had yet to make his first-team debut for Leicester City If that's common knowledge I'll hold my hands up and admit I'd never heard it before but it was certainly news to me

They're pussies compared to the Italian players of the 1970s. They went on the field with broken bottles in their shorts and hit themselves in the face to get opposition players sent off. The 1960s Italian players carried violin cases on to the pitch. Just ask Cloughie about cheating Italians in the European Cup when he was Derby manager.

It was downright dangerous. We were sat safely in the Nuttall Street stand but I can still see the crowd on the Riverside now swaying back and forth. It only needed one of those barriers to collapse

Is it? They haven't qualified for the past two World Cups and Italy's Euro 2020 triumph (England's abysmal failure) cannot be framed as anything other than an anomaly, one made all the more unbelievable by Serie A's struggles to remain relevant in continental competition. No Italian team has won a major European triumph since Jose Mourinho's Inter lifted the Champions League in 2010 and the golden years of Serie A are long gone because of incompetence, corruption, gross financial mismanagement and a lack of foresight Mancini has questioned why Italian clubs never picked up the likes of Gnoto (sp?) at Leeds and Sacchi said that "Italian football suffers from cultural backwardness, There are no new ideas. Other nations are evolving but we are stuck 60 years in the past. The problem here is institutional." England won in Italy for the first time in 60 years last night - that's how low Italian football has sunk. The second half revival (England sitting back as usual - memo to Gareth) offered some hope for them but, without another boom and bust scenario like 2020, I I don't see a big revival any time soon

You could say the same about Rovers away fans. All our lot sing about is Burnley and how much they "hate the Burnley b****** till my dying day". I find it all a bit pathetic to be honest Growing up in the 1960s and 70s when Burnley were the dominant team they were very much part of our lives - as anyone who attended school at the time would testify we were on the defensive most of the time. When Rovers were in the second division there was a group of us who used to go over to Turf Moor when Rovers were away to get our fix of first division football (always supporting the other team of course). I'm ambivalent towards them most of the time now - I don't like most of their fans and would always hope we crush them in derby matches but otherwise in a one to one would always back a Lancashire town club against any of the southern teams I'm not sure why the East Lancs rivalry is particularly fierce - it's been suggested it goes back to the heyday of the textile industry when the towns' factories were competing against each other for business. I don't know about that but sometimes the football rivalry goes over the top and is downright unhealthy

Far too generous No food and no drink and no toilets and lock them in for 2 hours after the final whistle By that time they should have all killed each other

Italy failed to beat North Macedonia to qualify for the last World Cup. The 2026 World Cup will feature 48 teams - will that enough to enable them to qualify for the first time in 3 attempts? There is no more damning indictment of the Italian game, which has been underperforming at both club and international level for more than a decade. Remember, it's not just that they haven't qualified for the past two World Cups; they haven't even made the knockout stage since winning the tournament in 2006, having failed to get out of their group in both 2010 and 2014. With Italy it's either boom or bust, and they're bust at the moment. A good win for England tonight but a meaningless list of players "playing regular football around Europe for the best teams" doesn't cut it I'm afraid.

By past Italian standards it's poor. Mancini was complaining in the press this week about the lack of quality home grown players in the Italian game. The failure to qualify for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups caused alot of anguish in the country and was masked by the Euro 2020 victory (which they only won because England failed to turn up in the final).

Italy have failed to qualify for two World Cups in a row Please stick to your area of expertise......Gareth Soutgate's "pumps"

It's a Middlesbrough thing.... Southgate and Mowbray from the same stable You can see why Southgate never hacked it really as a club manager.

Couldn't even qualify for the World Cup Try again

England lucky to survive that onslaught. Southgate gets so many things right, but then gets alot wrong too. First win in Italy in 60 years though, so a reason to celebrate

Gareth's tactical nous doesn't get any better. Some strange subs here

Italy are a poor side and have been for a while. They failed to qualify for the World Cup months after winning Euro 2020. England players should be kicking themselves for losing that final - and in our own national stadium too. Why didn't we play like this when it mattered? Congratulation to Arry. Steven Gerrard on Channel 4 encouraging him to leave Tottenham. That'll go down well with Spuds fans!

How the other half live: an interesting piece on how elite footballers get to matches around England. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/65017565 Now I understand that the time when the top football clubs travelled everywhere by train or road (because we had a transport system that worked) has gone. But is it really necessary for Nottingham Forest to get a 27-minute flight to Blackpool, or Ben Chilwell to fly from London to Leicester (an hour by train)? Of all the forms of transport short-haul flights are known as the worst emitters of greenhouse gas emissions. Do these clubs and players care (or know about) the damage they are causing?

End of the 2010-11 season, at the old Upton Park, we were in danger of going down for a while but ended about 15th IIRC after winning a 3-2 thriller at Wolves on the last day Robbie Keane missed a sitter for West Ham near the end so we escaped with a 1-1 draw. Their fans are 'orrible, Cockney geezers. Decent Rovers team - N'Zonzi, Samba, Emerton, Nelsen, Olsson etc

Isn't it best they are in the lower tier? West Ham stuck us in their lower tier years ago and their fans in the top tier gave us a good old Cockney welcome by lobbing spittle at us from a great height right through the match Good decision by Rovers officials - got it right for once

Luton ...... please don't. It's bad enough southern third division and fourth division clubs such as Brentford, Bournemouth, Brighton and Watford etc in and around the top flight in recent years without another non-entity going up. To see them in the Premier League while we're still languishing would hurt Luton's ground this season is among the worst I've seen - and that goes back to the 1960s when many grounds were smelly and decrepit and falling down

Palace, Southampton and Bournemouth would be a nice trio for the drop - 3 southern clubs to be replaced (hopefully) by 3 northern clubs including 2 from Lancashire 😁 Having seen them play Rovers in the Cup though I wouldn't be surprised if Leicester went down. They looked a poor side (albeit without Maddison that night).

Yes it was, Leicester in the Cup recently was close but Celtic never got a kick until the last few minutes when they scored (and that was a header). Martin O'Neill was a wily old manager though and he had sorted out in the second leg

Superb article 3 paragraphs from it I don't know how (or why) referees do it when you get scumbags like Conor Coady and their families. It should be compulsory for players, as part of their football "education", to be taught to respect officials on and off the pitch. Marriner and his assistants were in good spirits an hour after the match, as they were led outside to the car, past the team dugouts, which were now populated by Everton players and their families. A few players nodded at them, but most went quiet, as if a teacher had entered the classroom. Then Conor Coady, one of Everton’s centre-backs, turned to his two young children. “These are the referees,” he said, pointing at Marriner. “And we don’t like them … Boooooo!” As the toddlers responded by pointing and booing, too, the other players and their families laughed and joined in. On the way back to the hotel, Westy assured me that this sort of behaviour was normal. “Referees are the pantomime villains,” he said. “People think we get paid to turn up, ruin everyone’s day, and fuck off, but they don’t see all the work that we do.”

Going back decades Rovers were known for having a higher proportion of women at matches than most other clubs. I’m not sure of the reason but maybe we’ve always been a family club. We often went to games as a big group, mums, aunts, sisters, daughters, the lot. They know their football.

Back in the 1990s glory days we were pulling them in from the Fylde, north Lancashire up to Furness, and even parts of Yarkshire. If we can get only some of the back we'll be doing well.