Miller11

It was raining all game, the pitch was cutting up quite a bit, most of our players were covered in mud. At half time you could’ve took Morton’s kit, stuck it on a hanger and sold it in the club shop - it was spotless. Becoming a liability on the ball. Always been a bottler off it.

JRC could be the answer to our midfield problem. And there is no denying our midfield is a problem.

I can see kick off being delayed. They are asking fans to try and buy a digital ticket rather than turn up and get one at the ticket office. The website doesn’t work properly so I’m not sure how well that will go.

I’m trying!

Trying to get excited for this, but not really working so far. Being moved out of my seat, the prospect of there being more Birmingham fans than us, a frustrating transfer window, our poor form and playing style are all contributing factors. On the flip side it should present a good opportunity to progress in the best cup competition in the world. Hopefully a fringe player or two will give us something a bit different, and I’ll soon cheer up if we put in a performance and get a result.

Believe me, I wasn’t criticising the individual scouts. I know several of them personally.

I don’t know if we have dedicated scouts over there these days, and first team ready players might be tough to come by… Brown being a good example. I wouldn’t mind another Duff or Lenihan though. If I didn’t have concerns that our due diligence wasn’t up to scratch I wouldn’t have said it. There’s something not right in the process if we are constantly identifying players beyond our financial means. I’m not in the least bit bothered we’ve missed out on Porteus, but trying and failing to land him counts for very little if we don’t address the more pressing needs in the squad. If we’ve left ourselves time to move on to other targets, that’s ok. Too often though we end up with hard luck stories of near misses and tales of players having unrealistic demands rather than players on the pitch.

Depends where the physical scouts are being utilised. I doubt there is much data available for league of Ireland players or Mill Hill U13s. Plenty for Championship and Cat one academy players though. I remember specifically during Mowbray’s time he mentioned the difficulties of scouting players abroad due to flight costs. Perhaps we are doing things the wrong way round then? If it all comes down to finances we should be doing some due diligence and looking at whether a target is viable before committing resources to looking at them.

And over-reliant on “data”. I get the distinct feeling we spend longer looking at pages of statistics than we do watching footballers play football.

Would’ve liked Undav. None of Gelhardt, Porteus and Haikin would be the solution to our obvious current problems, so I’m not too fussed on missing out on any of them three. The worry is we seem to have put significant time and effort into at least two of these and failed to get them over the line. Hopefully this isn’t at the expense of achievable targets we actually need.

I don’t know much about him, but Thomas looks like a proper winger. Likes to stay wide and deliver the ball into the box. Quite excited about this one providing he doesn’t get the same treatment that Giles did last season from Mowbray. Championship ready players are what we need - nothing wrong with a bit of well directed short-termism to try and secure a spot in the playoffs. We do need to address the fact he’d have nobody to cross to, but that’s as much about tactics as personnel.

It’s long been the case that Rovers needed to better engage with the local Asian community. Yasir obviously has a fairly specific remit to try to engage with a very underrepresented demographic in our fanbase. He’s doing an amazing job, not only in bringing in more supporters, but also in the way he’s drummed up sponsorship for the initiative. There’s no cost to the club, aside from Yasir’s salary - and he’s worth every penny and some. Lovely to see busses full of kids heading down to Ewood, smiles on their faces, waving at fans walking to the ground, obviously feeling very excited, and importantly feeling safe and welcome when they get here. Of course the club needs to be much better in re-engaging with lost support, widening their efforts geographically, and generally trying to fill the ground again. But credit where it’s due, the Ewood Express initiative is brilliant.

You said the same thing last January.

Hang on… are we skint? Or do we have benevolent owners who are only stopped from buying us the very best players by nasty FFP limitations?

He’s said as much. Dolan and Markanday are only ever praised for “taking less touches”. No dribbling, he’d prefer it passed back to Kaminski.

Probably the best thread to add this… I’ve just tried to sign in on the Rovers website, but having entered my email address and password I get an error message telling me to please confirm I am not a robot. Happy to… however there is no CAPTCHA or indeed any means to prove my humanity in any way shape or form. Anybody else having this issue? Shit website is preventing me spending money with the club.

Very fair point. Until there is change at the very top not a lot is likely to improve.

Maybe not John Williams level, but I think it’s fair to say many of us were pleasantly surprised to see them bring in a DOF and manager who appear competent and somewhat sought after. A CEO with a similar level of pedigree to JDT and Broughton shouldn’t be beyond us.

Most players back themselves to break into the team where they are going to. Even if they don’t, I think I’d be happy being paid a million pounds a year to sit in the bench rather than playing regularly for 300k when I’ve no emotional attachment to either team.

Brereton up top, Dack in behind. Get Hedges on the left and Dolan on the right with the instruction to get the ball in the box. We’d score a damn sight more goals than we do with at present.

Completely agree with that assessment. He’s miles off it. Not even any nuisance value and positioning is very questionable.

A couple of good crosses went in today, Brereton should certainly have converted one of them. I don’t understand why we don’t do this more often. Overall though we didn’t get into their box often enough. The one time Morton took a bit of a gamble and committed in the box, look what happened - Dack was superb for the goal, started and finished the move. We’ve got some effective players, but they seem to be playing to specific instructions where scoring goals is very much a secondary objective

Our tactics are far more of a problem than our personnel.

at least that’s the end of the Kaminski and Raya debate.

The only thing Brereton has ever been good at is running inside with the ball, or getting on to a through ball. Now all we are ever doing is encouraging him to play pass and move stuff. He’s technically really poor and gets by on his pace and power and frightens teams with his unorthodox clumsiness. His technical limitations explain (but don’t excuse) that miss too. If he’d got there before it was bouncing up he’d have bundled it in.