Just look at this reply. What percentage of our fan base live under a rock? This Orlando site getting well deserved props for highlighting things. Far too often when a Rovers supporter does it they are rounded on and savaged by our own fan base. I can’t believe any of this is news to anyone, and I’m equally baffled by the fact that people seem surprised at these recent developments.

Collapse all the deals please Gregg. I’d happily go with what we’ve got and keep Wharton. I know, I know, he’s gone… but this is giving me a sliver of false hope that Adam is now staying. I know I’m setting myself up for a fall, but I can’t help it. I know it’s just our usual incompetence that causes nothing but misery deep down.

Don’t worry, we won’t be selling Dolan. He’s out of contract soon enough so naturally any bids will be knocked back so he can leave on a free!

I strongly disagree on Hill. I’m actually pretty happy with the O’Riordan signing, but Hill gave us versatility and was mature beyond his years. Big miss. Hopefully O’Riordan is ready to step up. I’m not the world’s biggest Travis fan, but you know what you got with him. A good option to help see games out for sure. Another big ask for two youngsters to step in and do a job here and there, and Ayari seems more in the Buckley mould. I think we will have to wait and see with McGuire. Tronstad took a while to settle and is considerably more experienced. Needs to hit the ground running really considering Telalovic looks miles off it and Ennis was clearly just a terrible fit for us from day one. Big, big expectations. Agree on Wharton, and if anything I think you’ve understated his importance. If we continue to try and play out from the back as we have we will be watching a lot of football through our fingers. He’s irreplaceable, but we ought to be giving ourselves the best chance of doing so, and 36 hours doesn’t do that. Couldn’t agree more with your last paragraph… unfortunately I feel we’ll see the unthinkable.

So this is looking the likely outcome of our window… Ins: O’Riordan McFadzean Chrisene Ayari McGuire (?) Outs: Hill Travis Wharton Ennis There is absolutely no way anybody can argue it’s been a success. If anyone had posted this as a prediction on the 1st of January they’d have been laughed off the forum or lynched. Anyone who claims we haven’t massively weakened our squad this month is either deluded or dishonest. Even if we generously add Buckley to the ins list, it’s appalling. The players returning from injury have been replaced on the treatment table by others. Considering we’ve been in free-fall for a couple of months our Championship status is very much being put at risk.

If you have a look at the Trust thread in here, there’s a post containing our latest newsletter. In there we highlight our planned discussion points for the MOU meeting coming up on 15th Feb. Finances are a big discussion point! Minutes from the meeting will be documented to give clarity over the answers we get as well as our follow ups to them.

Yet still every time we face a corner our players look around at each other completely confused.

Broughton has been talking for a while about increasing the age profile of our squad. Some nerd with a spreadsheet has probably discovered that by selling Wharton and bringing in McFadzean we can take it from 22.8 to 26.3, ticking a box and making a profit! This astonishing piece of data usage will see him as head of recruitment one day.

The line coming out of Ewood has been the same since the summer. Adam needs AT LEAST a full season here before he moves. Tomasson, Broughton and Waggott have all gone on record saying this, some as recently as a fortnight ago. Phillips and Wharton were seen as two players we would build a team around before their inevitable big money sales once their value was at an optimum. Yet we got less than 50 games total out of the pair of them, and less than 10% of what we’d hoped for with Phillips, admittedly much of that was out of our control and grabbing agents and rules that favour big clubs got in our way. Now it seems we are backtracking on everything and selling Wharton for a fee significantly below the figures we’d hoped for. There’s also a lot of 2+2=573 going on regarding his contract. Apparently he signed a deal in December to “make sure the club got something out of him and didn’t do a Phillips” according to Twitter. Well, he was already under contract long term. This new deal was a reward for his improved status in the team - if we’d have been selling him under his old deal, we’d be paying him less to settle in the event of a sale, so it’s cost us, not rewarded us. There’s obviously been a shift in the clubs attitude over the last week or so. Despite assurances court delays wouldn’t impact the day to day funding of the club. The whole thing stinks of desperation on Rovers part.

Not according to that statement they put out at the weekend.

We must have been messed about at least 700 times in the last decade or so then.

That’s not how transfers work in a lot of our fans heads. As soon as a club from a higher division/level comes in you are duty bound to arbitrarily find an example of a player of a similar profile that went for a similar amount and proclaim it a fair price. The selling team should in no way consider the impact of losing the player on the teams performance. The purpose of a football club is to develop and improve players for others these days, apparently.

Being the only player capable of playing the most essential role in the system the manager is hell bent on playing is pretty important, certainly not an “unneeded luxury”. Hopefully JRC can stay fit cos he’s our best chance of survival right now. Most of our “game changers” do so in a negative way. The one regular positive “game changer” has just lost the best supply line he has. Or is this just another round of the “he’s shit anyway” that tends to happen whenever we lose a player nowadays? Have you deluded yourself into believing we could’ve sold Dack and built a promotion winning squad with the proceeds? If so, why didn’t we do it with the proceeds from Armstrong?

Court documents show that Venky’s have £14.5 million sat in an account doing nothing except guarantee they were able to pay wages and bills. A further 15 million was set aside this month to add to that pot. The reason they have to do this is because they are being investigated over the purchase of a £5 million house they bought and have subsequently abandoned to rack and ruin. They have regularly pissed away tens of millions of pounds a year into this financial black hole they have created. Why is anyone “excited” at the prospect of this sale? The money is completely insignificant. It’ll go the same way as the Samba money, Jones money, Cairney money, Rhodes money, Armstrong money, Brockhall money, Raya money, etc etc. Assuming we survive relegation - which has just become a lot less likely, we can make excuses again this summer about transitions and rebuilds. The never ending journey that never comes to a conclusion can start again if we are lucky. There will be the odd bit of hope along the way, we will all be foolish enough to get excited from time to time, until another crisis comes along to remind us hope is futile and ambition is frowned upon.

The McGuire rain cloud will be Venky’s very own budget version of the Lewandowski ash cloud.

Imagine speaking to Jack Walker now… Well Jack, we’ve got a young lad come through the academy you built. He’s only 19, Blackburn born and bred, his brother plays here too. Genuinely a world class prospect, levels above what David Dunn ever was. No doubt he will go on to play for England sooner rather than later! Brilliant! That was always the dream, to develop young local talent that can help keep us at the very top! Oh, sorry Jack, did we not mention we are flogging him to Crystal Palace? You see because we have destroyed every bit of the club apart from the academy over the last 13 years, the 7th biggest club in London, with their small ground and zero trophies in their history are now considered a much bigger club than Rovers, even by half of our own fans!

We’d also gone a really soft, sloppy and avoidable goal down after spurning some good initial chances, then dominating play up until the edge of their area before running out of ideas (with the most obvious solution to our lack of penetrative passes sat on the bench). I was pretty pissed off in the ground at 1 down.

Another game where we completely outclassed lower league opposition. The gulf is immense. Still some really worrying signs and we’ll need to step up a good couple of gears on Saturday. If today is a glimpse of life without Wharton, we had better all brace ourselves for another trip to league one. Oh, and please play a normal formation on Saturday JDT. That weirdo Moran fan has been keeping his head down the last couple of weeks… no surprise as his boy has been off the boil for months. Miles off the standard of most of our player and a light years behind Wharton. Moran and Sigurdsson both very poor again today. Dolan and JRC were both really good today - we’ve missed them badly. As maligned as he often is, Gallagher is clearly our best forward, and I’m afraid Telalovic isn’t going to cut it despite his best efforts.

That goal wasn’t Gallagher’s fault. He was zonal marking at the front post. Helik got clear of all our centre backs who didn’t track his run at all. We’d have had a lot better chance of defending the set piece properly if we employed basic marking rather than convoluted systems.

I’ve no doubt I’ll be incredibly pissed off when we do sell him. I certainly won’t be wanking myself into oblivion at the prospect of replacing him with a few loans and couple of half million punts from league one and Scandinavia like many seem to be.

Also, half of 25 million is 12.5 million. That’s 2 million per player. If we pay them 10 grand a week for 3 years that’s 1.5 million each. Leaves an average of half a million in transfer fees.

Knowing quite a number of people who have taken this stance, a cup draw against a team we used to play consistently for a couple of decades before Venky’s showed up is certainly not going to win them back! Direct your ire at the ones who would rather watch us play Rotherham on a firestick while defending Venky’s and blaming our downfall on our low attendances. They will be all over the Newcastle game (if we beat Wrexham in another game they can’t be bothered attending).

So while he is on a 4 year deal that he only signed a few weeks ago, he doesn’t go anywhere. Maybe there are conversations to be had and decisions to be made in the summer, but a move to Palace won’t do a lot for any England ambitions, and it wouldn’t guarantee Premier League status either. There’s nothing to suggest Adam Wharton isn’t 100% happy at and committed to Rovers. People who are seemingly desperate to see him sold with vague hopes of money being “reinvested” seem to forget what the point of a football club is.

Why would you pick one player transfer out of the hundreds that happen every year as your benchmark? And why that particular one? I don’t really give a toss how much other players have gone for, as a club our primary concern should be what benefits us most. I’ve even heard people talking about a “fair price, which is just a ridiculous way to approach things. First and foremost we shouldn’t want to sell our best player. If someone wants to buy him they must expect to make an offer we can’t refuse. Venky’s literally have more than £25 million set aside with Indian courts so they can send over money to keep paying wages and bills. It is not an amount of money that is going to allow us to progress in the pitch. Losing Wharton would weaken us massively and put us in real danger of relegation, what good would £25 million be then? No amount of money we could spend would allow us to improve on Wharton at the present moment, and while swapping one exceptional player for 4 or 5 good ones might be something that we can reluctantly accept, swapping him for a years wages for his inferior teammates would be inexcusable.

As much as I hate the whole “”like a new signing” nonsense when a player comes back from injury, Rankin-Costello has been a massive miss for us and we will look infinitely better with him in the side. Dolan is another very welcome return.