The Sam Hart extension and some of the others understably aggravated a lot of people, especially at a time when the club was pleading poverty and not offering refunds. It seems hyperbole to suggest that mentioning this is directly stating that Mowbray was to blame for the postponement. I personally dont rate Buckley, as much as I appreciated his goal on Saturday. I understand that he is young but I feel his weaknesses go beyond his obvious physical limitations and that he takes too long on the ball and doesnt appreciate the pictures around him. Praising or indeed criticising a player and the lack of patience you perceive the latter to be is not really relevant, this is a forum to share opinions on players. I dont rate Buckley, I wouldnt have him in the squad and I would loan him out. I wouldnt put money on him making a real impact for us but of course I dont rule it out. But that doesnt mean that people dont support him if he wears a Rovers shirt. I dont share your relaxed attitude towards our repeated habit of conceding first and especially the set pieces which is compounded by the fact that Mowbray has delegated this crucial task and hasnt seen fit to take control again. Both are signs backing up an inability to improve on last seasons results and displaying poor form, if anything these areas seem to be showing decline, not improvement.

I personally havent seen the improvement, we have just been bumbling around mid table, never picking up with points with enough consistency to get close to the top 6 or to improve on last season, with form getting worse and worse. What is the improvement you see? What makes you think we arent far away? You mention getting the first goal but I dont see any logic for assuming that it is something that will change, I believe our record of goals in first halves is poor across Mowbrays tenure here, something Rich Sharpe touched on recently. And you are obviously far less likely to lose games if you score the first goal, but we repeatedly are not doing. Its easier for anyone to win games when a goal up. I just look at various signs too of poor management. We have scored the least from set pieces in the division, we regularly come up with shambolic routines and the manager has not seen fit to intervene, merely allowing his coaches to crack on. We concede far more from set pieces than we score. We also might have a marginally better defensive record compared to last season but clean sheets are few and far between, if you have to score 2 or more to win then you are facing an uphill battle. I also look at performance levels which if anything seem to be getting worse and worse and the style is based on flawed principles. You dont have to dominate possession to win games, especially if it is in ways that cause more problems than benefits, for example, we dont have defenders with the ball playing capabilities to play out from the back, and the shape of the midfield 3 seems to leave it further exposed. The last comment seems unnecessary, who has claimed that the game was postponed seriously because of Mowbray. If anyone has, its a ridiculous belief of someone in the minority. Its not as straightforward as there being 2 camps, but I dont get why we cant at least hope for promotion even under Venkys, who nobody hates more than me. Promotion may be in spite of them, but it takes one good season, one good appointment, and why bother if you cant keep a flicker of hope of success even if it isnt entirely even logical or realistic? When we appointed Coyle, I was fuming but I didnt accept relegation before the season, even though I knew it was possible. I get what you are saying but sometimes a football fan dreams and hopes in the face of logic and probability. I also dont get the fear of not being able to replace a manager who is clearly in a rut, surely if the argument is that Venkys couldnt possibly get better, how did they manage to attract Mowbray in the first place? Whether its pure luck, an agent link, whatever, it is not definite that we would find another Coyle, we could improve on a manager who was on the scrapheap before he came here but has done a good job yet hit a wall.

Out of interest and apologies if posted elsewhere, but solely on the job Mowbray has done and where you deem us to be at the moment, on the assumption that the next manager isnt "another Coyle" would you stick with Mowbray or feel it is time for a change and why?

One thing that really worries me is that Mowbray recently remarked that he delegates set pieces to his coaching staff. Why has he not bothered to intervene considering how bad they are?

Martin O'Neill is certainly not someone we want near the managerial seat. One player didnt make a team but he is a prolific Championship goalscorer in the last year in a mid table team so take him out and its a huge blow. Even if you took out Newcastles chunk, some would invariably go to help balancing the books too. But to adequately replace Armstrong alone and his goal output would be so difficult, it would be a hope of bringing in a few but that is a difficult ask. Just seemed pointless to mention such an unobtainable standard that he wasnt up to. He isnt a potential Balon D'or winner either but hes still a bloody good striker at this level and if we sold him, moved Brereton and his lack of goals there and put Dolan where Brereton goes, we would be massively weaker, make no mistake.

Of course not, but you would like to think that there is more of a broad search available as other clubs have shown rather than look directly to former managers. His record since being here when the club was so much different is underwhelming at best.

Is the side top 6 material? Of course majorly down to Mowbray and issues in the transfer market, but I dont get how it could be considered top 6. Armstrongs goal record make him a top 6 striker. Dack probably could be in with a shout too when fully fit. Chuck in Elliott and there may be enough goals there to mount a top 6 run. Looking further back, none of the centre backs are, the left backs are crap, Nyambe is decent but not sure he is top 6 calibre on par with the likes of Max Aarons, Adam Smith, Connor Roberts, Kiko Femenia etc. Kaminski, I think hes been decent but not sure he has been stand out enough to go next to Ben Foster, Tim Krul, Asmir Begovic, Freddie Woodman etc. Travis is decent, but top 6 calibre? Not too sure about that. And then plenty who flatter to deceive 9 times out of 10, Rothwell, Holtby, Johnson, Brereton etc. I think potentially that a good manager could maybe overachieve and get us in there if the side became well drilled, organised, with clarity and a clear outlook that suited the players here.

I dont think that Mark Hughes would even be mentioned if he didnt have links in the past to be fair.

Why is the benchmark of a mid table Championship club striving for a top 6 finish now that of "a regular 15-20 goal a season Premier League player?! Just for a bit of perspective, last season, 4 players got 20 or more goals in the Premier League, Vardy, Aubameyang, Sterling and Ings. 8 more got between 15 and 20, Mo Salah, Kane, Mane, Jimenez, Rashford, Martial, Aguero and Abraham. No Championship strikers will be of that level. Brereton has never shown competence as a central striker, he doesnt have the instincts and would struggle to get double figures. He has only shown signs of competence wide left or occasionally wide right. People dont seem to fully appreciate having a striker who scores so often and how they arent easily replaced. There is absolutely no evidence of a 30m bid. Seems unfathomable at this stage. If we are saying hypothetically, it would depend on if he shows any willingness to sign a new deal. If he is willing to, I would reject the bid and the potential 20m windfall that it would give us, give or take after giving a large chunk to Newcastle. If he didnt, then with a year left on his deal in the summer, it might force our arm, but it would be reluctant and a huge backwards step.

If we freed the position for those players, Brereton is a seldom scoring player best suited wide, Gallagher is bang average and Vale totally untested. Not something to be embraced and we would need a replacement even if it would be nigh on impossible to do so with an equivalent. 30m would probably be accepted understandably but lets not assume that it would do anything other than majorly weaken us to lose the top scorer in the league. A big chunk would go to Newcastle, a further one would help to offset losses and any replacement is unlikely to score goals like Armstrong does so it is not an eventuality to be celebrated.

Im not sure that anyone in their right mind would recommend that the current Chelsea manager could take the Rovers job.

Plenty. There tends to be at least a couple of Championship games on a week and has been the case for a while and I tend to watch many. For quite a few years, Derby were on more than their fair share especially when they were in and around the play offs. I feel it is almost pointless to sign a loan now in that it is becoming nigh on impossible to get into the play offs and we wont go down, but if we have no money and have to rely on Lenihan, Branthwaite and the constantly injured Ayala for half a season it wont be enough so a short term fix may be a necessary evil. If so, someone like Kipre would suit the bill, more recently impressed at this level and coming into his prime.

Huddersfield have conceded 6 more goals than us so not sure about that. Sarr may have scored 2 v us but defensively he is a bomb scare, and Schindler matches Ayala for being injury prone. I've never fully aligned myself to the opinion that we have needed a veteran leader in at centre back as I dont see why we cant sign good defenders who are not on their last legs. You seem very insistent that people havent seen Keogh but he has been a regular at Championship level for much of the last decade so im sure people have. He has always had an error in him but at his peak would probably have made a good addition to us at this level. Now, after a year out and 6 months at League 1 level, and at 34 years old? Not for me. He would also be (like the loans which I equally was underwhelmed by) a short term fix in a season whereby any achievement is a long, long shot now.

I meant from Chaddys point of view in regards to defending Mowbray by only bringing up potential refereeing mistakes that went against us.

How can a manager who came in with the admittedly difficult task of trying to keep a club up be considered to have done a good job that season if we went down?!

It totally undermines any defence of Mowbray to totally dismiss the relegation. Obviously Coyle was worse than Mowbray and carries much more blame but no one has ever tried to defend Coyle because we all know how bad he was. But there is no use extrapolating 15 results at the end of the season, quite a few against teams with nothing to play for to try and calculate where we might have finished. His first task was to keep us up, a difficult task, and he failed. It is as black and white as that. Equally, I feel that Mercer is undermining his points by dismissing the fact that Mowbray got us promoted. Ultimately that first season and a half are not why so many are in favour of a managerial change anyway. Regarding all of the supposed long term upgrades, the success of such projects only become tangible and measureable when they start leading to better results. If they do indeed exist and lay foundations to improve us, they still dont strengthen the managers position as another manager can use them, Mowbray wont get the scouting and analysis tools as part of his settlement!

He undoubtedly failed to keep us up, he had a more difficult task than O'Neill and Warnock so its difficult to directly compare (although them 2 are better managers capable of improvements in a much shorter time frame) but he did fail to keep us up even if Coyle was more responsible. This nonsense about points per game extrapolated or his win percentage is all irrelevant, his first task was to keep us up, it was a hard if not impossible one and he failed it. He wasnt lucky to get promoted though as you say, he was an idiot to dismiss the prospect of a league title but he got us promoted convincingly and comfortably.

Ultimately no one knows who we would appoint next, I dont get why Adkins is more or less realistic than anyone else. But even someone like that would allow us to reset, we are stagnating now and our manager is tactically confused, constantly changing system/formation/personnel in a desperate attempt to bear out a flawed theory around a principle he has around style of play. We need new ideas as well as some clarity in direction. With Hughes, I would hazard a guess that his ego would have to shrink to allow him to take a job not only in the Championship but back at a club that he previously felt that he outgrew. People mention him more than usual because he used to manage here, like they do with Ainsworth not because of his impressive work at Wycombe but because he is a fan which should have nothing to do with anything.

You as touched upon seem to have fallen into the trap of falling for what he says. If he is all about the long term, why did he sign 4 loanees this season and Downing for 12 months? You acknowledge that he has failed to improve the same achilles heel in defence that we had since promotion. Inconsistencies in selection are mainly from the injury prone players he has signed or refused to let go even when interest arose. The intangibles behind the scenes are not bearing out improvements on the pitch. And this idea of our fully fit squad is really speculative, its the argument of an underachiever in Mowbray making excuses. So many teams have had injury woes on par or worse than us this season. We will rarely if ever have a fully fit squad. The Premier League argument is heavily flawed. There are only positives from us going up, no negatives at all. Financially is the obvious one. On the playing side, Armstrong would likely sign a new deal so we could protect that investment, Nyambe likewise. Elliott could well come back. And we would have the platform to invest sensibly and prudently, we wouldnt have to be using Gallagher, Brereton, Buckley and Rothwell every week. As long as we genuinely gave our all and tackled the league with enthusiasm rather than throwing in the towel before a ball was kicked, then even if we came back down in the first season we would be in a much better place. And there are some crap teams at the bottom of the Premier League so with savvy signings survival is not an unreachable dream. There is no genuine reasoning in being ready or not ready for the Premier League. If you get promoted you are ready, if not you are not. If the only alternative is to keep swapping between a Kean to a Berg to an Appleton then maybe we would settle for Mowbray. But it isnt and that is hardly a ringing endorsement anyway.

Your suggestion of whether I would be happy with Aidy Boothroyd suggests that you are pigeon-holing managers based on their source. Boothroyd was a journeyman with an underwhelming CV who I saw see a talented England Under 21 side crash out embarrassingly in the group stages under him in 2019. It is not about source of manager or type of manager, it is about individuals. I would agree that Cooper would have been an underwhelming appointment, but he was a well thought out one from Swansea and has done a far better job than Potter who he followed. My point is that we should consider managers across the board, especially in a position whereby we are not desperate for a short term fix, we want someone to take us onto the next level now we are stable yet becoming stagnant. The reason that people suggest the same names is because we only know a limited number of managers ourselves, we wouldnt suggest the England Under 17s manager, the Chicago Fire manager, the Dinamo Tiblisi manager or the LASK manager because we wouldnt have the knowledge, that is why people go for the same names on a messageboard. Maybe a Nigel Pearson or a Mick McCarthy will have better credentials or be deemed more suitable compared to anyone we can find elsewhere, I dont know but we shouldnt limit our search. I dont like directors of football (or certainly "advising agents") because it invariably can lead to players signing for a club for whom the manager didnt want and thus doesnt play or use. I also think that at our club it provides more scope for things to go wrong, for things to become unnecessarily complicated. Maybe a senior manager such as Pearson and McCarthy may be better for us in that they are used to being the main man and are dominant figures but also could give us some better direction and would likely build from a solid base, rather than Mowbray whose tactics are confused, idealistic and unsuitable at this moment in time.

I dont get this "until the end of the season" mentality at all. We arent at the point where we are in disarray, that we need a firefighter, a temporary solution, a loud mouth. You regularly mention Keane as if we need those scare tactics, instant reactions, we dont need that. We dont need a shock, we need a plan, a clear, fresh set of ideas to push us onto that next step. Mowbray has put some foundations in place and done some good work. Clearly, we have hit a wall with him. The players dont seem to be not trying necessarily, to be revolting, or to be in crisis. But equally, Mowbray seems tactically confused, and totally unable to find consistency as he lurches between formations, trying to find a platform to play idealistic football based on flawed principles that only expose the weaknesses within. We dont need to try and play football obsessed with possession from the back, nor does the alternative have to be long ball percentage based which equally wouldnt suit us. The chances of anything major coming from this season seem remote already. We have too many points and too much quality to realistically find ourselves in a dog fight. We would need an absolutely remarkable run of runs to sneak into the play offs, it is 99% likely that we will find ourselves in mid table so already an eye has to turn beyond that. The key is not to be fixated by certain tags or categories. The natural instinct is to go for the experienced head, there may be value there, a Nigel Pearson or Mick McCarthy type. But maybe it warrants more creativity. Perhaps look abroad, look how that has benefitted Barnsley and Reading and how Watford have gone down that route and seem to have initially benefitted. Norwich did so when they got Farke. Or even imagination beyond that, look at Swansea with Cooper, or even look into League's 1 and 2. The rest of the season shouldnt be a short term mantra, of course the aim should be to sneak into the play offs until it isnt mathematically possible but it isnt a short term fix that we need to seek out. It is the next step. They are the same old names because we dont have the grasp of knowledge to be able to name managers across the world, but as mentioned earlier, they should be considered with Barnsley, Reading, Watford and Norwich all succeeding down that route. But people will say the same old names because that is what they know. That being said, id definitely swap Mowbray for Pearson and McCarthy now, both have much more impressive recent CV's at this level. This is what you would do, not what the club might do if it still has certain links to certain agents. Would you sack Mowbray as a simple yes or no question if you was confident enough that the interviewing process would be thorough? Yes or no.

He said he didnt see it and would have to see it again. I havent seen specific moaning from Mowbray about the Armstrong incident either. Neither biased party is relevant though, both seemed to be incorrect decisions to me, one for each team, but both are inconclusive from the angles seen.

Armstrong seemed to be onside and the ball seemed to have gone out of play for our goal but for both, a camera angle was not available to fully clear either up, there may have been a slight part of Armstrong that was technically offside. It is laughable yet predictable bias presumably aimed to defend the manager by moaning about one and merely ignoring the other, based partially on biased commentators and Rovers staff!

Every managers priority is themselves. We might not be much better off, but after Kean and Coyle had finished with us we was very much in a worse position.

Behave yourself. Such direct comparisons do no favour to the credibility of the argument that the common consensus indicates, that Mowbray has taken us as far as he can. If Mowbray goes he will do with the majoritys blessing and positive opinions of the overall job even if towards the end it went stale. Venting and hate? Not at all. Coyle and Kean? Totally insulting.