October For Rovers Heaven Or Nightmare?

[Guest Kamy100]

Karl Sturgeon (aka Ywansie) has done this preview of our fixtures in October:

It seems Rovers’ live television appearances are spread awfully far apart. We seem to be shown in blocks: after clogging up the Spring schedules with a run of live matches against Spurs, Liverpool, Wigan and Chelsea, every league game Blackburn play in October will be covered on either Sky or ESPN. Just like buses they are.

Anyone looking forward to watching Rovers from the comfort of his armchair should be warned, however: this might not make comfortable viewing. These live games include our trips to the Emirates, Stamford Bridge and Old Trafford; our only home game is the first East Lancs derby in the top flight since 1966. October has the potential to be scary long before Halloween.

Judging by last season’s, err, performances against the Big Four, as they’re now almost universally known, Sam Allardyce seems to be following the same 30-game strategy that Alan Curbishley espoused while keeping Charlton in the kind of mid-table mediocrity clubs of our stature are meant to be happy with: write off your matches against the Champions League mob and do your best against the rest of the proletariat. Rovers certainly didn’t put up much more than token resistance against these teams last season. It’s a sensible plan, sadly, but it does work best when those dead games are spaced out. A succession of away games as tricky as the one we’re about to face, at a time when the league table is still so volatile, has the potential to damage morale. No-one wants to be playing catchup when the clocks go back and there’s a real danger Rovers could end the month adrift, stuck at the foot of the table making nervous small-talk with Portsmouth.

But there’s something to consider. The top four have surpassed the rest of the league to the extent that losing by a merely narrow margin can be classed a decent result. We’ll save the whys and wherefores and rights and wrongs for another day, but this inequality of strength means we have to aim beyond the naked result. Forget last season’s depressing collapses against Arsenal and Liverpool: Rovers’ 2-1 defeat at Old Trafford was something of a moral victory. Roque Santa Cruz scored past Tomasz Kuszczak to end Man Utd’s long, record-breaking run of clean sheets (the run was hastily revised in the media to be limited to the games Edwin Van Der Sar played in, but no matter) and we generally looked, for one of the first times since Sparky buggered off, like a team who deserved to be in the Premier League.

It’s essential we take that attitude into all three of our upcoming away games: a few spirited performances like last season’s at Old Trafford, rather than the timid acquiesces at Anfield and the Emirates, would keep plenty of peckers up. Rovers would have something of an advantage by getting those ordeals out of the way early on. Who knows, we might even grab a point or two.