Miller11

Reminder to all… YouTube highlight reels are not the best indicator of what to expect if/when a player actually signs! You need only cast your mind back 12 months to the Zeefuik ones. Look how that turned out.

There’s also “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. There’s no doubt we have looked improved when we have mixed it up a bit, and if we continue to do so I’m sure most fans will be happy enough. I’m struggling to think of any goals for that have come as a direct result of our playing out from the back… plenty in the goals against column though. Being so rigidly stuck on that style of play killed us against Burnley and Preston, the timing and the opponents making these the worst possible games to collapse in. The worry is that we will again stubbornly persist with it (to our detriment) when the pitches get better, or the personnel changes.

Had to watch this one from my sick bed, but very pleased with the win. Mixing the play up clearly works and gives us a chance even when we aren’t playing fantastically well. The carved up pitch might have done us a favour! Dack and Garrett were very good today, was very worried when he got that early booking but he approached the rest of the game in a very mature fashion. Praying Ayala stays fit, held the back 4 together well. Hedges is sometimes a bit of a victim of being a utility player, but he showed his quality again today.

I love the watching your favourite band analogy. At the moment Rovers are putting me in mind of the last time I saw Paul Weller. Everybody had to endure his new stuff that didn’t really go anywhere, it seemed stubbornly relentless Everyone in the place knew he was capable of belting out a Jam classic, or something off Stanley Road. A bit of Style Council would’ve been a really welcome change. But he persisted with the “new” to the point when he did play Wild Wood, everyone was just asking why he couldn’t have done that all along. Happy New Year all!

I’d love it if we played with proper wingers. JRC I think would make an excellent one in a 442, Hedges would do well on the left.

It’s the fact that nothing has changed. Mowbray bred apathy, Tomasson was the great Danish hope. There was a lot of positivity when he came in, however, our familiar slide down the table looks more inevitable by the day, and I think it’s more disappointment than dislike. He compounds this with his talking us down, despite our lofty league position. A bit of positivity might rub off on the fanbase, but nobody at the club seems to want that. Those no shows against Burnley and Preston either side of the World Cup break will anger people for a long time, and the lack of creativity and generally poor football certainly don’t help. Then there is the self inflicted damage of the pissing about/passing out from the back.

So you don’t care where we finish this season and don’t really think results are important. In fact you won’t even set any sort of target. Sounds familiar. I see you’ve got a new sound bite straight from the club to quote too. Yo-yoing once would give us more money than Venky’s have put in to this point, so I don’t understand why you’d take issue with it. Plenty of teams yo-yo for a couple of years and then stabilise in the Premier league. Why would that be problematic? A really disingenuous Mowbray comment. The real reason you don’t like seeing his name mentioned is that you were really reluctant to move him on, your support for him was unwavering for far longer than most fans, and you only committed to a massive u-turn once our season was in the toilet - and you hate to be reminded of that fact. It wasn’t a yellow card. Your selective interpretation has been proved wrong most recently by our failed appeal. You could make an argument that the rules need changing, but you aren’t even doing that. You are now arguing that the referees and an independent appeals board have implemented them incorrectly and you are unquestionably correct. I can’t believe the police paid you the slightest bit of attention, and hopefully it was just the lip service your petty display of bad losing warranted. I hope no Boro fans felt incited by Buckley throwing the ball… maybe your pal Susan will be having a word.

Oh yes!

I don’t really have any clearer idea on what sort of league finish you think would be acceptable. I’m afraid I don’t understand your Mowbray comment, Come on Chaddy, if it’d been the other way round and a Boro player had chucked the ball at one of ours you’d want him hung, drawn and quartered. You literally reported the Forest keeper to the police last year for much less!

You have a point here, but on the flip side, do we want players committing acts of petulance on the pitch all the time? Should bouncing the ball off the back of an opponents head whenever they are feeling a bit sulky become as commonplace as moaning about every decision? Does spitting on someone really do any damage? That time Joey Barton punched Pedersen in the stomach, it wasn’t really a hard punch. From acts like Buckley’s to the fact players dive and feign injury all the time, the scrutiny is always on the referee. Buckley and most other players need to grow up and be held accountable.

There is plenty wrong with refereeing standards. Personally I wish they would book players for exaggerating injuries, like they are supposed to. We’d see half a dozen a game. The inconsistencies and failings elsewhere don’t mean the officials got it wrong last night. As it was completely unnecessary to throw the ball at the back of his head, any force is excessive.

I think the excessive force is more around throwing the ball TO a player, Buckley threw the ball AT a player. He wasn’t giving him the ball back to restart the game, he was bouncing it off his head in an act of petulance. There was absolutely no need for him to be doing it, so it’s automatically an excessive use force.

If we finish the season there I will be very happy. I don’t think we will though, on current performances I think we will be further away than last season.

I’m personally not shouting for his head yet, but what were pre-season expectations? Where is an acceptable finish this season? Mowbray failed to deliver a playoff spot last year, which was seen as a failure and we parted company with him (too late for my liking). Why should we be accepting anything less than playoffs this time round? Plenty of JDT’s biggest supporters are delighted with our transfer business. Nyambe, Lenihan and Rothwell apparently aren’t being missed at all and at least 2 have supposedly been replaced with far superior players, so surely anything less than top 6 shouldn’t be acceptable this year? I’d also like to pose this to @chaddyroverstoo as he often makes similar comments. I expect the answer will be “We are third”. Use it while you can, because we won’t be for long. The bar will become lower and lower, just like it did with Mowbray’s staunchest defenders last year.

Buckley’s red card sums up a lot of our players generally. Petulant, snidey, immature, cowardly, undisciplined and moronic. Reminded me a bit of the red Malumbu got for West Brom soon after Allardyce took over there, but at least he had the balls to boot the ball with a bit of force. I don’t think the officials were left with any choice. Better first half, with the goal being far more direct than the way we are being coached to play. Typical second half. It was obvious Boro would be a different beast after half time and after they scored so quickly there was only going to be one winner.

Our manager, sorry, head coach, is literally saying that we aren’t aiming to get promoted. He’s dumbing down expectations at every opportunity. All talk of strategies, projects and journeys is complete nonsense. And our recruitment department need to pull their fingers out. Maybe use their eyes and brains instead of a spreadsheet.

Our current reality is that while we don’t have parachute payments we also don’t have overinflated premier league salaries that would swallow them up. We are subsidised to the tune of 20 million a year by our idiot owners with very few questions asked. We have a category one academy that has paid dividends and provided a large proportion of our first team for a long time, and despite the lies we have been fed over the last couple of years, some of the best training facilities in the league. We have been fortunate to have had several players at this level who score a lot of goals, including one currently. You are absolutely right that competing with the very top teams in this division is a tough task. However, there is no reason we could t mKe the playoffs. Surely being one of the best 26 teams in the country shouldn’t be beyond us? Nobody is demanding promotion, but it should be the aim. A playoff spot would be a good achievement and is realistic. The main barriers to achieving this seem to be lack of accountability and desire.

We need a manager who will win us enough games to get us promoted. That’s should be the primary objective, not an afterthought. Out strategy is failing before our eyes. I’ve pointed out we have found ourselves in a no win situation with Brereton - unless we go up, which I see no chance of.

They have even binned off the £6 monthly magazine because, shock horror, nobody bought it. Who’d have thought replacing the programme with something more expensive and sub standard would sell less!?

I’ve got very low expectations for this window. If anyone is willing to take Dack’s wages off our books I think he will be off - just get the feeling JDT couldn’t wait to sub him off against Sunderland and will drop him at the first opportunity, probably tomorrow. As soon as Rankin-Costello has a poor game (which again could well be tomorrow up against an in form Ryan Giles being played in his natural position) he will be out in the cold and probably off on loan. Mola has been bombed out of the squad after one too many horror shows. Which is good. However, he has at least occasionally shown glimpses of being a potentially competent player, unlike Hirst who is persisted with. Alarm bells are ringing a bit that we will end up taking Hirst on a permanent deal, why would we be persisting with such a poor loanee otherwise? It’s pretty likely we will bring in another player or two on loan, benefitting the parent club far more than us. Any signings we do make will not be done to address the glaring gaps in the squad that we can all see, they will be based off a massive spreadsheet full of stats and flawed projections of potential re-sale value. Nobody from Venky’s down seems remotely bothered about results. One member of our new look recruitment team that was in the news the other week told me on Twitter a while back that concentrating on results was “surely a backwards-looking methodology”. Remember when Waggott was on about finding Mowbray’s successor and they seemed to be concentrating on finding someone to “carry on Mowbray’s journey” or words to that effect. Even Mowbray himself was banging on about how he hoped we went for a “development coach” to replace him. If Brereton goes, our fall down the table will be spectacular. If Brereton stays, it highlights how incompetent we are from the top down, and is a complete failure of any purported long term strategy. The journey is purgatory.

Kaminski Harlock Ayala Hyam Pickering JRC Buckley A. Wharton Hedges Dack Brereton Subs: Phillips, S. Wharton, Edun, Garrett, Travis, Gallagher, Burns

With that logic if we take out the parachute payment recipients from the equation we should comfortably be the top of the next pack. The likes of Luton, Millwall or Preston don’t have the level of owner subsidies we do. Who else has a category one academy in this division? Therefore a playoff spot should not be out of the equation.

This particular one is attempting to shut down any criticism of our current regime or deflect from inexcusable performances by repeating “We are third in the league”. With the discussion we had you are pretending you didn’t blindly defend Mowbray until it became obvious we weren’t making the playoffs and his departure became the most obvious scenario.

Nah, too much in there that doesn’t suit his narrative.