Me too, panic stations. It will be interesting to see how hard they are pushing tomorrow. In theory the last major chance they have to capture attending fans for renewals.

Which is precisely the reason I'd rather we never sold another player again and why I've been saying for years that it is pointless discussing the merits of selling X,Y or Z because all it does is help Venkys with their bills, it does nothing to help the transfer kitty or manager. Sell, sell, sell, % for Adam Wharton, Raya - end result is Venkys' injections are reduced/stopped for a while. That's all there is to it. Some fans still don't get this - I see stuff on Twitter all the time about selling X because the money is too good to turn down or is all he's worth etc. But we aren't a normal club functioning with normal thought processes. All that happens here is the money goes into the black hole and the stooges collect some extra salary as a well done for helping the Indians save. Manager is left scratching around for frees and loans.

Yep, Gregg carried the can for the two January fiascos and when he'd watched them sell Wharton from under him and JDT and it was obvious the money was going elsewhere, together with JDT's departure, it was the end of his project and he knew it. Personally I don't believe for one second that the 'admin errors' they claim were responsible for the January fiascos were anything of the sort and nothing to do with Gregg or other staff down there, but of course as usual when the shit hit the fan they wheeled him out and he had to say something remotely professional to explain what had gone on and took responsibility for it as a senior staff member. Unfortunately some of the more gullible of our fanbase they conflated him publicly accepting responsibility for the fiasco as being the same as him being the issue/problem that caused the fiasco. I'd suggest two very different things. One being the head of department and public speaker doing the professional thing and taking the ultimate flak for the failings of others, the other being in my view other shadowy characters and middlemen doing their level best to scupper deals as part of a money saving and power play strategy.

I suspect Gregg was employed and remunerated on targets other than saving the Indians money wherever possible. I suspect the two stooges that have been here throughout this whole rotten period are tasked with saving the Indians money wherever possible and this neatly explains the contract situation.

The only 'model' that is acceptable under Venkys is the 'benefactor model'. The only use they have ever been or can ever be to this club is putting money in. If the plan is to break even then fine, but not with Venkys remaining in charge. Might as well put me or anyone else on here running it if it has to break even. We could do a better job on the operational side running it in our lunch breaks.

Beyond the AI generated rubbish they went with in their promotional material I see they are now reverting to the tried and tested marketing approach of sticking a microphone in the hands of supporter(s) who can tell us all about what having a season ticket means to them. Very predictable and quite tiresome but I suppose when they've openly admitted that they can't offer us anything to look forward to in terms of what happens on the pitch the easier approach is to hand it over to the supporters to do their bit based on habits and traditions

I find it strange that after hearing directly from Travis, Tronstad and now Batth in the last couple of weeks that despite being happy here and willing to stay the club has made zero effort to even speak to them about new terms, that we are supposed to also believe that they are busy at work trying to persuade Dolan to accept a new offer. Deliberate, planned demolition of the squad and gutting it of proven quality assets. We know how that ends.

Gestede knows that his golden ticket to a long and lucrative career at Rovers is to go down the 'project' route. It serves him no purpose or benefit to talk about getting to the Premier League or delivering a return that can be measured in terms of promotions, points, positions, because all that is doing is setting a bar against which he can be judged in the near future. It is far, far easier to instead promise jam tomorrow at some unspecified future date when the grand project will come to fruition but that will never be today. As long as every couple of years a player is sold for a healthy profit or someone else emerges as a project from the academy he can keep everyone going. Mowbray played that game as well. It seems to resonate well with the Indians. What is doesn't do is take into consideration changes in circumstances. Like the owners being investigated in India for dodgy financial activity, Court restrictions, Covid, waking up one day and deciding to do something a bit different, all of which have happened in the last few years and have seen the Mowbray/Venus project come and go, the JDT/Broughton project come and go, the Eustace/Park project come and go and now the Gestede/Ismael project come.....he's an idiot if he thinks he's getting years and years to build some grand project and that's before the instatiable appetite of the owners and their minions to sell our assets off wherever they can. There cannot be a project or long term plan in these conditions. The only route to success we had was on a Eustace or similar type galvanising the squad and forging a strong team and unit out of experienced signings blended with the remaining tight knit dressing room we had last summer. The spine of a solid side added to with valuable experience in Batth and Weimann etc. They made sure that wasn't going to be allowed to work and having gone close to the play-offs twice in the last three years they need to quickly dismantle the rest of this squad otherwise we might go close again. All that serves to do is put pressure on them to spend or do something remotely ambitious in January which they don't want.

Wears a nice suit and has the textbook hand gestures sorted though.

Did he learn the hand gestures on his course?

Shortfall alert - we are now at £20-25 million a year that Venkys are pumping in 'just to keep the club afloat' It's going up by millions every time they give an interview. Will be £30 million the next time they speak. Must do better Rudy.

I detect a shift in policy back towards the 'academy model' that JDT was employed to oversee and which Eustace ditched. Unfortunately for them despite running with the academy model and JDT doing a good job with it by handing first team action to numerous academy lads whilst sustaining a competitive side, he was too good and had us in promotion contention. Added to that he was hungry and ambitious, and wanted promotion. A bad mix for this lot, so he had to go. They made quite a mess even of JDT walking out, and by the end of that process had set us on a path for relegation to League One. Eustace was all about fighting fires for the first few months and ensuring survival was achieved. Eustace has shown in his jobs that he wants tried and tested experience to call upon. Weimann, Batth, McFadzean and a distinct lack of academy players getting debuts during his time. This lot want some quick cash from academy lads coming through like Adam Wharton. Eustace was never going to play that game. Again too ambitious and wanted results first and foremost. Lo and behold now Ismael has turned up it is back to the previous approach, in a few short weeks we are seeing Tyjon and Montgomery in the thick of things. Such a move will earn him credit and time with the regime as they greedily eye another project and sale or two to improve their figures and get their bonuses. I wonder what congratulations and rewards the stooges got from India after the Wharton sale went through. I bet they sat around congratulating themselves late at night as they worked out what perks they would get in return as a thanks from India. Now they want more. While all this is going on remember that results on the pitch, developing, getting anywhere as a club - all totally and utterly irrelevant yet they expect you to pay for more of it.

Mowbray was literally the perfect man for Venky Rovers and probably still is today, which makes their treatment and disposal of him all the more bizarre. He was happy to plod - I don't mean that disrespectfully but he was not a Lambert, JDT or Eustace who actively looked to get out elsewhere as soon as they saw the reality of what goes on from the inside. He was willing to put up with their shenanigans, either because he was fine with it, happy to coast along each season or just wouldn't get any better offers. He was doing the job they supposedly want - it is clear they don't want Premier League football and other than his last season we never looked remotely capable of getting there - he was turning their investment in players into enhanced values and they profited significantly from some of them. From the fans perspective because he was competent and seemingly a likeable bloke who knew how to handle the fans and players he had most people on side and as a result of that and his League One promotion I'd say 90%+ of the Ewood crowd were quite happy with him. I had nothing against him personally until after he left Rovers when he then publicly declared that he had advised staff members to look away from Rovers during his time as manager. Totally unacceptable in my book and confirmed a long suspicion that he truly had free reign to do whatever he pleased at Ewood with minimal consequence. It was abundantly clear that by the end of his last season the end of the long road had been reached - he'd done over 5 years which is hard to find nowadays especially in the Championship and he'd still not delivered the play-offs. Having said that I didn't see any proper backing for him in January 2022 whilst we were sat in a very strong position (sound familiar?). I am increasingly of the view that his departure was engineered by the curtain twitcher for similar reasons that Gary Bowyer was ruthlessly disposed of despite us being in a relatively comfortable position in November 2015 - behind the scenes politics and power rather than footballing reasons. Curtain twitcher saw an opportunity to bolster his own power and establish control over the manager's office which he didn't have with Mowbray due to his direct relationship with India.

Poor old Steve and Sohail aren't going to get their PRP next year if we use up precious funds giving pay rises to Travis, Tronstad and Brittain. Likewise now they've gutted the squad of saleable assets they'll be eyeing up that lot as some quick cash when inevitably other clubs chuck some offers our way. To make matters even better they can dress it all up as Ismael's revolution and pretend the players didn't want to stay here, which the numpties among our support base will swallow hook, line and sinker.

We know how this goes by now despite some people's best efforts to delude themselves into the old 'grass isn't greener' routine. That one used to wash in the Walker Trust days when we spoke of people like Santa Cruz and Bentley moving away and struggling but under the existing rotten regime more often than not the grass is greener. I can't be bothered listing all the names but there are a lot who have walked out of here and gone on to better things whilst this club flounders. Dolan most certainly won't get a PL move. That was never realistically on the cards and I doubt he seriously thinks it was. What is on the cards is a 3-4 year Championship level contract at a Derby, Stoke, Coventry, Middlesbrough etc. together with a juicy signing on fee. This is purely because the people running this club have decided we aren't in the business of offering Championship level deals these days. Which is hard to fathom given our losses continue to, allegedly, reach £20 million a year.