Look on the bright side: just think how really gutted we'd all be if that happened to the Rovers.

I think 1864Roverite has got it wrong. How you can give Flitcroft any kind of endorsement whilst criticising Tugay is to be kind, crazy. Flitty was anonymous, Tugay on the other hand was involved in nearly everything that was positive about Rovers' performance. He looked, for once, like the player of the last couple of seasons.

Douglas did very well too, linking with Gray on number of occasions. He fought well and played some nice stuff around the box.

The boys up from did well, with Cole putting in another excellent performance.

Reid was woeful and rightly substituted.

For god's sake blue phil. What's best is that people don't use vile racist language and that people, whatever their ethnicity, are treated with respect. Is that too much to ask for?

As for older people using that kind of language, well there's bound to be a few, but most would know that it's wrong. Ron has even less defence though, because he's been in an environment where that kind of crap isn't tolerated - and he still routinely uses that kind of bigoted nonsense.

It's difficult to imagine something more offensive than calling a black person what Ron did. I mean who lets a word like "nigger" slip out? As Ian Wright said Ron uses that type of language regularly. And the "Ron is old so eh says that kind of thing" is another crap argument. Most people of Ron's generation do not use that kind of racist language.

If I used that kind of language at work I'd be out - and rightly so - and so should Ron. You have to have standards in public life and not using the most craven racist stereotyping language is one of them.

As for black people using the term. Firstly, it's not something that's done generally. It's like gay people using "queer", or Irish people "Paddy", or Spurs' fans "yid". It's about about people who suffer from discrimination reclaiming the langusge that's used against them and using it as a badge of honour, stikcing two fingers up to the bigots.

As someome else has pointed out on this site, Rover6 is like someone who when asked the time, always gives the same answer. He or she is going to right twice a day.

The main reason for our position has been injuries to key players - Thompson, Amo, Ferguson.

This season is difficult to unpick and understand. It's worth saying though that the the tide of hysteria that's grabbed the board over the last couple of weeks has seen a host of posts levelling the most bizarre accusations at Souness and some of the players. The main one is that they did not try against Leeds, or for that matter all season. Well that's appeared to be the case in a couple fo games - Villa at home and Liverpool away spring to mind. However that's not been the real problem, which is the fact that we have had a series of injuries, below-par perfromances and a lack of professionalism from some senior players. For me Scotty summed up, excellently, the current state of the side in his balanced report on the Leeds game.

Injuries - four of Souness' major signings have been out nearly all season. The midfield has missed Ferguson, Thompson and Reid. The first two would have been first choice and Reid, given time and a run in the side, has the pace and strength to make an important contribution. Amo has attracted a lot of criticism, but the jury must be out on him. Against Leeds, at least he showed some leadership and took responsibility for the team. Again with a run in the team, he can only improve - as Fergie was doing, as he picked up the pace of the premiership. I doubt that a Rovers' side with three of those four playing all season, would be where it is now.

The underachievers

Friedel. Last season Souness said he was worth 10-15 points. Well he's dropped a few this season - the resuting points lost would see us safe.

Tugay. From the best passer the club has ever seen to.... Remember Cetic away when he ran the game. Has it really been the same player this season? Although part of the problem has been those around him who been unwilling to receive the ball and make options.

Gresko. Looked fantastic last season, a nightmare this season. Duff's absence aside, can anyone explain the turnaround?

Neil. Poor all season. However calls for Curtis and even Babbel to fill the position are wide of the mark.

Babbel. For me he has been a disgrace. A lack of application on the pitch, combined with a seires of ill-judged comments if it.

Cole. Started well, got injured. Looks slow and a shadow of his former self.

Yorke. OK I'll admit it. He's my favourite player and the Rovers' best bet of unlocking defences. If Souness has made a mistake this season it's not getting enough out of Yorke and Cole. Having said that until Xmas the fans were on Yorke and Cole's backs - post Xmas it's Souness' fault they haven't performed. It must be a bit of both - but the Rvoers' first choice two for me.

Can ayone account for such a slump in form the players above? Is Souness really to blame for a combination of injuries and a lack of form from key players?

The odds and sods

Jansen. A crying shame, but I don't know anyone who thinks he'll ever play football properly again.

Emerton. We all know that a host of clubs wanted to sign Emerton and we rejoiced when Souness got him to come to Ewood. He's done Ok for me. He works hard and is an excellent crosser of the ball. But he's playing in a poor team and not getting the ball in the right areas of the pitch. In a team performing as it did last season Emerton would have done well.

Gally and Stead have done OK, but right now aren't the answer to the club's dire situation.

Souness' mistakes

The main one in my book is not getting enough from the senior players, especially the front two pairing of Cole and Yorke. Starting two kids against Liverpool was madness. Elsewhere in the team he's had little choice of who to play. The midfield - arguments about the left wing aside - has picked itself. And those calling for Danns or Donnelly to start have really showed themselves to be dunderheads.

The back four has chopped and changed with injuires and suspensions. Only Nissa can feel a little badly done to and Taylor was poor all season. And remember their run in the team last season coincided with a poor run of results. Only Short and Berg's return changed things at the back.

So my view is that Souness, although not blameless, has had key players missing most of the season and key players taking a dip in form. The extent to which it's his fault is unclear, but to sack him now would be a folly.

Sometimes clubs with good teams and good managers get sucked into relegation battles.  It's a fact of footballing life.  A win yesterday and our position would have tranformed.  

The plain facts are that Souness has been a success at the club, and everyone knows that.  Jim who basks in the boast that he's been calling for Souness to be sacked, "for months" is a joke.  He is unserious and get a kick out of the blue's recent failures.  Along with Rover6 and others he clogs up the board with the same negative tripe - day after day after day.  There is no balance and no insight into the repetitive half-cocked abuse thrown at Souness, the players, the Board, John Williams and god knows who else.  For example Jim rails against the players, when anyone at yesterday's game knows that there a number of excellent performances and that we were let down by some inept defending.    Then there's Rover6 who's short time on the Board has been spent making one washed up proposal after another - "Mahon's the answer" when anyone who's watched him play over the last few years know that he isn't good enough, or maybe Danns, Donnely. Douglas.  Well they're promising kids, but they won't get us out through a relegation battle.

And then we get the endless attacks on Souness' signings, when the truth -and again everyone know this - is that Souness has brought in some excellent players - Freidal, Berg, Hughes, Neill, Tugay, Ferguson, Cole, Babbel, Bjornybye.  And who are the bad buys?  Grabbi of course and then to be honest there are a few fringe players that every club brings in.  The jury is out on Amo, Yorke, Reid and Emerton, but the later is improving.  And who didn't want Gresko at the club at the end of last season?  So the jibes at Souness's signings are basically a lie.  Under Souness Jansen, Duff and Dunn were transformed as players and again everyone knows this.  

So what we're left with is a load of empty abuse, not based on the facts or the club's recent history adn which to be honest I doubt could be sustained by true Rvoers' supporters.  The worrying thing is that some of the more rational members of the board are giving succour to the infantile tendency and need to catch themslves on.

Rover6.  Have you watched any of the teams Souness has put out sicne his arrival?  Negative is the last thing you could have described them as.

Please tell me you're a wind-up.

Souness and the players must dig us out of the position we're in - anything else is a fanciful diversion.  The club's situation could be transformed with a couple of wins, but... it's very easy to be relegated from the Premiership - even with a good squad of players - as West Ham found last out last season.  

We need a win or two soon.

Anyone calling for Souness to be sacked must have the IQ of a five year old child.  Rover6 I don't want to get personal but you are talking the biggest pile of w*nk  that I've read on this MB in the last three or four years (and that includes my close friend Mr Tdrog).  OK things aren't going too well and perhaps Souness has made mistakes, but which manager hasn't?  

Grow up or knob off back to the official board.

Slept on it and feel no obligation to alter one jot of my opinions of Rover6.  His/her comments since joining the board have been, from start to finish, drivel, idiotic, badley informed, plain wrong.  All teams have bad periods, all players have poor runs of form and all managers make mistakes.  

Freedom of speech, of course!  But we expect certain standards on this MB in my opinion.

If controversial is shorthand for an unending stream of uneducated prejudice, mixed with a liberal sprinkling of racist bile then Thenodrog take the stand, except the award and enjoy it.  You've certainly earned it!  

Got to go now - just of to see controversial comic act Bernard Manning.

Graham, this is how it happened:

1.  Paul leaves Blackburn aged 18 to go to University and never returns

2.  In Manchester Paul meets Jenny - born in Belfast - who already has young son.   Father is Celtic (and United) fan.

3.  Said boy follows Rovers until old enough to realise that all his friends back United and Irish family support Celtic.  

4.  Boy, now aged 13, is made clear about the sectarian support of the Scottish big two by mother.  Not unreasonably, living in Manchester, he thinks it's crap and can't really work out what religion has to do with football.

So there you have it - 13 year old has better insight into the issue than most of the Celtic fans who have posted here.

I think a of of people on this thread are avoiding the issue; that there was/is a significant minority of Celtic fans (mainly inadequate young men) who don't know how to behave in public and believe it's ok to drink themselves into a stupor and threaten and harass their way round Ewood last night.  They also manage to graft on "anti-establisment" politics football style - support the 'Ra, the Palestinians and whoever, ironically whilst sporting Papal banners.  Spot the inconsistnecy there.  

Jas and the like close their eyes to those facts - and to the central issue that the old firm is based on a deep seated sectarian heritage which fuels the kind of behaviuor we saw last night.  

I am very sorry to hear about the Celtic supporters with tickets who didn't get in last night and I'm ashamed to hear that some Rovers fans were involved in trouble, so my basic points remain.

Mr Haworth

I live in Manchester through choice, and my partner is Irish.  There, all explained in one sentence.

Maybe we're spoilt at EP - there's little trouble these days, but  I don't find the drunken agressive behaviour of large groups of young men acceptable.

I wish I could report that it was the Rovers' performance that had depressed me tonight.  Well it did. but I need to say what I saw tonight both inside and outside the ground.  I travel from Manchester and park at Darwen Vale.  I brought my child with me, who's Irish and a Celtic fan.  On the way to the ground we were repeatedly pushed and abused by drunk Celtic fans.  In McDonalds we were sworn at by some drunk who had to restrained by fellow Celtic fans who were sharing a bottle of Cider with their food.  Inside the ground, at hlf time I was abused and spat at by the Celtic fans and to cap off a great night, as we walked back to our car we had to run the gauntlet of hundreds of aggressive Celtic fans.  It wasmy worst experience at EP since the 70s.  I have no respect at all for Celtic, their sectarian heritage and hooligan fans.  

I think the following points need making;

1.  The police should have banned drinking on the streets

2.  Celtic fans should not have been allowed to travel, excpet on official coaches

3.  There should ahve been a corridor of empty seats at the corner of the Darwen End

James Lawton: Souness reveals Scots' pitiful decline as Valencia take plaudits and Celtic the wooden spoon

02 November 2002

The eruption of green and white at Parkhead this week told a lie. Well, several lies as it happened. For a start, it was not the Battle of Britain waged between Celtic and Blackburn Rovers in the Uefa Cup. It was the Battle of Credibility, and, though they take a one-goal lead to Ewood Park in two weeks' time, Celtic did not win the prize. In fact, they were exposed.

Any idea that they, and Rangers, might be welcomed into the Premiership as exciting new blood was always fanciful. The Premiership, as we should all by now know nearly as well as Adam Crozier, is governed by two instincts: greed and fear.

The big English clubs, insulated for the moment at least from their own stupidity by television money and sold-out season tickets, have no pressing need of the Old Firm's huge fan base... and the small ones who claw on to Premiership survival could never be persuaded to put themselves at risk by voting in two new contenders of vastly greater earning power.

This was the bleak reality for Celtic even before they contrived one of the more astonishingly misleading results in the history of organised football. Graeme Souness's team were embarrassingly superior in the first leg but for the moment when the splendid Brad Friedel could only parry John Hartson's header into the predatory path of Henrik Larsson.

In fact, the night which was supposed to put into the shop window the excitement generated by Celtic and their vast following achieved nothing so much as another insight into the pitiful decline of Scottish football. The plight of the game north of the border could only be underlined by the fact that Souness makes no great claim for his team at its present stage of development.

Indeed, last season's Worthington Cup win and entry into Europe, on top of survival in the Premiership, represented striking gains for the apparently played-out club he guided back to the big time so recently. Certainly, those achievements were seen as a basis for long-term future progress rather than some instant busting into the élite of the English game.

For all the modesty of their situation, however, Souness's team looked as if they had come out of an entirely superior drawer. The craft of Tugay Kerimoglu, the running and touch of Damien Duff, the powerful emergence in the second half of the recently injured David Dunn, and the constant threat posed by the old swordsmen Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole pointed to a potency, albeit unfulfilled on the night, way beyond the resources of the celebrated home team.

The result was that we were, starting 24 hours earlier at Anfield, able to take a slide rule to the relative strengths of three European leagues: in ascending order, those of Scotland, England and Spain.

That La Liga sits firmly on top of this particular pyramid was established beyond a scintilla of doubt by Valencia's beautifully pitched outplaying of the Premiership leaders, Liverpool. Then, when you measured the gap between the expectations of Liverpool and Blackburn and applied it to the huge gap between the game of the latter and Celtic, the scale of the Scottish predicament was clear enough.

Celtic failed the credibility test just as they did in the qualifying round of the Champions' League when defeated by Basle. They were sufficiently animated by the roar of their crowd to scuffle to a result. Yet the defeat was one which did little to impinge on the sense that Souness has the sure calculation, after some years of doubt and trauma following serious heart surgery, to operate profitably amid the game's unrelenting and unforgiving pressures: he is, indeed, the serious football man he has always believed himself to be.

His return to the city where he made his managerial reputation, and mocked sectarian madness with his signing of Rangers' first Catholic player, Maurice Johnston, was certainly an impressive business.

If a team speaks for its manager on the field, Blackburn were eloquent enough in all but the hard edge of killer instinct, which always a key element in Souness's own formidable repertoire as a midfielder of the highest quality. That, Souness would no doubt say, is surely his next order of business, one which should not prove unassailable with the presence of Yorke and Cole and the recovering Matt Jansen.

Twenty-fours after Liverpool's creative failure against Valencia, maybe it was inevitable that there might be some speculation on what would have happened if Souness had not fallen so early in his attempts to reanimate his old club.

The popular wisdom is that Souness "rushed his fences" when he returned to Anfield to find what might have been described as a hotbed of complacency. When this is put to him he tends to scowl and say: "Maybe I didn't rush my fences quickly enough." Like the man in the opposite corner of the ring at Parkhead, Martin O'Neill, Souness has a passion for the game and an intolerance of indifference which it is always good to see prospering. The same is true of Gérard Houllier, the week's conspicuous loser in the Autumn Credibility Stakes. But, of course, it was a loss which had to be placed in the strictly relative category.

However much you suspect that Souness, had he survived his first drive to return Liverpool to the best of their traditions, might have brought creative dimensions which are currently missing at Anfield, you surely cannot do so without acknowledging the qualities that Houllier has installed and which are still be be fully integrated in the make-up of Souness's Blackburn.

Houllier has created a team of utterly authentic competitive instinct, one which came close to wiping out the vast technical advantage enjoyed by Valencia. It meant that in their different ways, Houllier, Souness and O'Neill, whose team was no less outclassed than Liverpool's, had all left impressive imprints on the week's most scrutinised action.

What they could not do was compensate for the decline of competitive standards in their separate theatres of action. One result was that the Battle of Britain could never rise above the status of a local and rather minor dispute.