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There’s two Rovers Radio shows coming your way this weekend... www.roversradio.co.uk Friday, 6pm - Pre Match Show It’s a ranty one this week! Topics for discussion include Formations, The QPR game, and one of our favourite topics, the Nyambe situation. Playlist so far contains Northside, Pere Ubu, Blackburn’s own Illicits... still time to get a request in! Sunday sees the debut of our new show Sound of the Season from 11am. It’s brought to you in conjunction with BRFCS... you may be able to guess the season in question from the images below...

Harvey Elliott sea shanty

We’ve got a pre-match show on Friday... guaranteed plenty of whining in that one!

You can listen live at 11 am on Sunday 14th here... https://roversradio.co.uk/ We’re really excited about this collaboration, hope you enjoy it! Some updates to the site and shop coming this week too.

Where’s all the where’s all the Mowbray out brigade brigade?

Yeah, he looked great! Would be nice to see him get a bit of a run.

The show started off well. Goldberg and McIntyre was the best booked thing all night. Carmella v Banks was decent. The women’s rumble was messy and eliminations needed pacing better. As an irregular viewer I don’t get the hype around Bianca Belair. There’s a big difference between making new stars and giving everybody a go at the top. Flair is the biggest star in Women’s wrestling for several generations and will remain so. Rhea Ripley has got it all though and either seemed a better choice of winner. The whole 24/7 thing is shit. Reigns v Owens was exactly as expected. Spots over story, with finding new ways to jump off things being more important than logic. The ref who just gave up on counting when Paul E couldn’t unlock the cuffs just botched bigger than that Jericho Lionsault the other week. WWE production values are always great, but at times this verged on being over the top. Some strange camera work and frantic angle changes that threatened to induce seizures. Not Kevin Dunn’s finest hour. Its becoming far too frequent that people who join rumbles early go all the way. It was almost an afterthought that Edge drew number one. Christian’s return was brilliant and I’d be much more invested in the idea of a long term reunion with him and Edge than Edge in a title program. So glad Rollins didn’t win, the Orton injury thing had little to no payoff, some nice cameos, Miz thing was pathetic, Damian Priest looks the business, strap a rocket to Bobby Lashley, Style’s big man adds an interesting dynamic, Riddle and Big E had good nights too.

Can see all of that happening. Hoping against hope you are wrong with Rollins though. That would be as boring as everything else they are doing.

Anybody tuning in to the Rumble tomorrow? I’m well out of the loop with most of the current product. I’ve found the vast majority of their recent programming boring or stupid, and I find AEW’s irritating and stupid, but I’m always hopeful for the rumble. A couple of surprises would be nice, nostalgic ones preferably. Seeing Daniel Bryan is being touted as the favourite... I can get on board with that.

We discuss some of Mowbray’s comments this week on our pre match show today https://roversradio.co.uk/listen-live Particularly some of the ones that have caused the most annoyance. Starts at 1pm

I think Brereton definitely benefits from the change to a 4-3-3 rather than a 4-2-3-1. He’s gone from looking like a joke to a competent footballer. Still needs to contribute more though. All Mowbray’s talk of a slow build and a journey... We’ve signed Dack up for another 2 and a half years, Elliott will be gone in a couple of months. On Elliott, bags of ability, but I’m not sure his performances have always been as impressive as some would have us believe. He’s certainly not been effective enough to push us towards playoff contention, so I’d rather give Dolan game time. Ultimately, I don’t think a change as subtle as the one in formation is going to be enough to help us even get near our target for the season. Bigger change needed. This could well be the start of a three game purple patch... usually happens when the majority of fans start questioning the manager. Plus it’s his cup final. 2-1 Rovers

Yeah... this caused a lot of questions to be asked at Coventry www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/questions-over-coventry-city-training-12042449.amp

To be honest I probably understated it... he mentioned it about a dozen times

To summarise: We’re on a journey When he took over we were 15 games away from relegation, we got good results but still went down Praises Dack Wr have moved on from Dack, Smallwood and Mulgrew We are on a journey We started the season like a house on fire but we’ve lost our consistency He had to change the mindset of the players to tell them that we should be pushing for the top 6... this is Blackburn Rovers, PL champions in 1995, we need to push in from mid table We have no centre halves and Bradley Johnson - a midfield player has had to play there We lost Wharton who started the season as centre half, Ayala who has two promotions and Derrick Williams tore his hamstring off the bone we’ve had 15 positive Covid tests Praises Branthwaite We had no right backs and a left back had to play there Harvey Elliott is a boy, Klopp trusts us to do right by him because Mowbray has values he lives by and has loaned players while at Cov We are on a journey He’s spoke to some Premier League managers about some of our players He’s honest, Armstrong is a young boy and he tells the managers he’s not ready yet He’s also spoke to managers about Rothwell and Nyambe Wants to see our players in the prem, hopefully with us. He wants to sit in his armchair and watch them on match of the day The fans demand results, but hopefully they can see we are on a journey Fans of a certain vintage remember Shearer and Sutton, he remembers Ripley and Sherwood There is no pleasing some of those fans Its important we all stick together People on social media these days always talk about how he’s picked the wrong team or made the wrong subs Talk moves to Venky’s... when they came in we were comfortably top half of the Prem with Big Sam, when he took over we were 15 games away from league one The owners are humble, honest and full of integrity They run very different businesses and wouldn’t profess to be football experts He’s been to see them four or 5 times They understand we are on a journey They understand we have no centre halves and Bradley Johnson - a midfield player has had to play there They understand we had no right backs and a left back had to play there Hopefully we can get a solid defence and finish the season strongly

I’m 8 seconds in and he’s on about the journey.

This was what the Chorley groundsman was up to at nearly midnight last night We are a joke.

If you come at us from the off, you’ll be out of sight by half time. Can’t see anything other than a comfortable Swansea win. Having said that, it wouldn’t be untypical for us to get a paper over the cracks kind of result as we are at the point where even some of his most staunch defenders are asking questions of the manager.

Predictions: I expect the tombola to be given a good old shake. Not quite outright desperation, but hints of it. Kaminski Buckley Lenihan Branthwaite Douglas Elliott Trybull Davenport Brereton Dack Armstrong I can see Nyambe being dropped for three games for his part in Stoke’s goal... maybe longer with Bennett being back “on the grass”. Buckley will be rewarded for his goal by a start in the most attacking position on the pitch. Davenport for a recall, because broken clocks an all that. Trybull in for no apparent reason. Dack to play despite being miles off the pace, particularly as Gallagher looks injured. However, without Gallagher’s stellar wing play and ability to win headers by the corner flag, the attack will be a big mess, sorry, interchangeable. Kaminski to be outdone by a divot à la Tim Flowers and Stan Collymore. Being 40 yards off his line initially avoids some of the embarrassment, but Lenihan is there to turn it in and put Swansea 1 up inside the first 10 minutes. They go on to a comfortable 2-0. There’ll be straws to clutch at and hard luck stories from Mowbray and his acolytes, who though decreasing in numbers become even more stubborn. An offside decision, a throw-in given the wrong way, maybe even a red card. Besides, there’s positives! We had 98% of possession for the first 7 minutes of the second half, and Lenihan completed 87 of his 94 attempted passes to his centre back partner. Anyway, what can we expect against the mighty Swansea, we are just little old Blackburn Rovers after all. People ought to get off Mowbray’s back, crowdfund his statue and concentrate our energies on worshiping Venky’s for not quite liquidating us yet.

Ok, I’ll humour you, seeing as Liverpool V Man Utd is typically dull. You, like everyone else, have seen one replay of that disallowed goal, from a difficult, no, a poor angle. You’d be able to tell a lot better if you were level with the last defender. Of course that’s the position the linesman takes up... unfortunately he has to judge whether a player (who as an aside gets caught offside an awful lot) who is trying to remain dead level with a defender might have moved his fingernail, big toe or tip of his penis a centimetre In front of said defender at the precise moment the ball is played. As that ball was played from a reasonable distance away, to be 100% accurate in this he’d need eyes that work independently of each other, and probably two brains. So, he makes the best call he can. It was close from the angle we all saw. The only way you can be NEARLY certain is by using expensive, time consuming technology. Which is of course what happens in the premier league and is an utter farce. It’s also only come about because of the massive scrutiny officials get and the ridiculous expectations brought about by people online and in TV studios making a lot of noise. Oh, and managers who won’t take accountability for their own failings. Thats probably one of the reasons O’Neill hasn’t felt the need to come out and whinge about our goal. He isn’t clutching at straws to try and defend the fact he’s doing a poor job.

Bollocks.

You could say the exact same thing about our disallowed goal.

@JoeHtweeted this out yesterday, the average positions our players took up throughout the game. We expect a ridiculous amount from Nyambe... a right back being the second most advanced player on the pitch! They clearly tried to swamp us down their left hand side, on more than one occasion it was 3 v 1. I don’t think Elliott did anywhere near enough defensively. None of the midfield that started did. The other worry is how deep Dack had to come to try and get hold of the ball and get us playing. This is only really confirming what my eyes tell me. Games when we were entertaining and effective are becoming a distant memory. We are a stale mess at the moment. Subtle tweaks to the formation and personnel aren’t going to rectify this.

Who’d have thought training on the Ewood pitch (despite the fact Jack gave us the wonderful facilities at Brockhall) and trying to skimp on the use of undersoil heating during a prolonged freezing and snowy spell might cause lasting damage to the surface?!

Not helped by the fact he’s expected to close down their keeper more often than anyone else!

“We’ve got two left backs, I’m not sure where that came from. “We’ve got Barry Douglas, we’ve got Amari’i Bell, it would seem mad to me to sign a left back when you haven’t got any centre halves.” Mowbray with a quote very similar to what other people have been getting absolutely savaged for saying by his fan club.