I pointed out earlier that even Preston, held up as an example of a well run 'locally owned' club doing quite well on a limited budget, still managed to lose £7 million last year in the Championship despite not really spending much on transfers. So this is where we are at. Ideas of self-sustainability are pipe dream stuff. Even the so-called well run clubs with minimal spending are still running up big losses.

That's what I was referring to. A £3 million increase in 'one off charges' to Venkys London Limited. I think the question needs raising with Cheston at the shareholders meeting in July.

I noticed this when flicking through the shareholder accounts the other day. Can someone explain what this is? It seems to read to me in the accounts as though Cheston says this £3 million was largely down to payments to the parent company (or something of the sort). Certainly seems like a massive increase and reads as though that cash has gone to VLL or the owners in some form.

I meant to say those are the only two options if they want out and want to stop funding the club. Of course they can cart on as they have been and juggle things around to suit them.

I think it is fantasy land to think Venkys could reasonably expect or ever get anywhere near that figure for this club. Two options - they do what Whelan did at Wigan or less successfully Davies at Bolton - write off their investment and sell the club for a reasonable price to someone else to pick up the tab from here on. Or alternatively dump the club into admin/liquidation and walk away - again they won't be seeing close to that money. It's gone. Spent. Not to be seen again. It's like me spending a fortune renovating a house with borrowed money and then when I decide to sell the house expecting someone else to pay those loans off whilst buying the house too. Isnt going to happen and nobody would realistically expect it to.

They aren't shares in the club, they are shares in Venkys London Limited. So surely VLL can sell the shares in Blackburn Rovers Ltd for whatever price they decide?

So we owe them £108 million then. You can't 'owe' your owners share capital. That money has been invested. They aren't getting it back and if they think they are they're in for a wait.

I thought Waggott said we were mid-table or top 10 for wages in the Championship?

Yes there is. We're similar clubs, with similar infrastructure, in the same division in the same part of the world and similar attendances. Turnover should be similar. In terms of attracting new buyers we should be similar in terms of worthwhile investments. Wigan will have owed Whelan a fortune, at least on paper. Whelan knew when he'd had enough that he was never going to recoup his investment which he had built up over 20+ years. Admittedly probably not as high as Venkys 'debt' here but he will have poured tens of millions in and will have known he wasn't going to get it all back. Venkys method of funding Rovers has been to pile it all onto the books as 'debt' whereas other owners opt to do it differently, or write the debt off. Vincent Tan at Cardiff heaped it all onto the debt pile and then wrote it off as he knew that money had gone. Likewise Bolton - Eddie Davies was supposedly owed £170 million or something for his investment over the years, but when he wanted out he 'wrote off' that debt and walked away from it all - even though he probably wasn't even worth that much in total. All sorts of tricks going on and again - if Venkys decide tomorrow to leave the club the first thing they do is accept they are going to have to walk away from that debt - there's no other way of getting out of it.

If they are fed up with pouring money in every year the only alternative is to walk away. This is what happened at Wigan with Whelan and Bolton with Davies. When the end point came they walked away, wrote off their investment and left the club to someone else. Venkys will never get £250 million back from Rovers. How do Rovers owe them close to £250 million? I thought it was about £150 million?

An example of their couldn't care less attitude - in more than 8 years of ownership I'm not aware of a single sponsor/deal with a company or business that the club has benefited from that has been brought by Venkys involvement. Not a single one. Not a single advertising board, partnership, shirt sponsor. In 8 years+. It might be loose change in the scheme of things but if they'd have used their no doubt extensive contacts in Asia to bring other partners and sponsors to the table the club could have generated higher revenues, helping with FFP and reducing their 'investment'. Yet there's been nothing. Once again the only assumption to be made is they either don't want it or don't care - and from there the well of sympathy runs dry. You've got admittedly improved efforts on the ground in Blackburn to try and develop more business and corporate links after 6 years of complete neglect, and yet we've supposedly got the biggest poultry/pharmaceuticals firm in India owning the club and not once have we benefited from that by bringing big players into the sponsorship of the club. Before anyone says 'but no big companies would be interested in sponsoring a Championship club' I suggest you go and visit some websites of rival clubs and look at large international companies that do sponsor Championship clubs, many due to who the owner is.

Whatever it is you have to assume that it isn't causing them much pain. If it was they'd have walked away by now, because they certainly aren't in this for sporting/profile reasons. You'd think any company alarmed by continually pumping £10-20 million per annum into a black hole on the other side of the world would parachute in industry experts to get on with running the club properly and with autonomy to make big decisions. Alas it seems they're still wanting to run the show themselves in their own bonkers way. So either the penny hasn't dropped after £150 million or alternatively they aren't bothered in the slightest. Nobody feeling the pain would just allow the circus to roll on every year.

The debt is the big unknown. Clearly nobody is ever going to come near Rovers whilst we remain so heavily in debt to Venkys. Of course that is mainly 'soft' debt with no timetable for repayment and I very much doubt there's any expectancy from Venkys that they will get the money back. Like Eddie Davies at Bolton they will simply have to walk away from most or all of that when the time comes to leave. Wigan I think cost more than Venkys paid for us, which shows how far things have come in football and what a bargain Venkys got for a Premier League club. The point with Wigan I think is relevant - people point at Bolton as an example of the chaos that could await and yet overlook Wigan who were recently bought out by a foreign company. My point remains that if Wigan Athletic can be whipped into good enough shape for a sale then Blackburn Rovers can. I presume however that Whelan made them attractive for sale by effectively leaving them with low debts and a sensible structure in place, unlike what we have, which brings us back to square one - the only way Venkys are getting out of this - either by selling the club or by walking away - is by writing off the debt.

We'll probably never know the answer if Venkys refuse to even pick up the phone when someone tries to get them round the table

Why are there so many references to a 'local' future owner of the club? Those days are gone. Cast the net globally and there are potential owners. Yes there's the Bolton saga to use as an example of failing but up the road at Wigan they found a new owner when Whelan sold up. No disaster there yet?

We are so heavily in debt to them compared to others primarily for two reasons. First because they have run the club so poorly from top to bottom - destroying income streams and incurring massive costs through their negligence - and secondly because heaping losses onto the debt is the way they have chosen to fund the club - whereas other owners have chosen to do it through different means or have written debts off rather than keep allowing it to pile up. The basic premise is the same here as elsewhere - we're losing millions per year and always will be at this level regardless of who owns us unless someone can pull rabbits out of a hat - same goes for most of the others. The trouble we've got is Venkys now seem to be caught in some strange damage limitation mode where they don't want to lose much more money yet won't bankroll or put the steps in place to get to the Prem which is the only real way out of it. Other owners who are able to pump millions in either do it because they enjoy the game or with a proper plan to get promoted.

Every Championship club without parachute income is totally dependent upon the whim of their owner(s). Some mitigate their losses by treating things like ticketing and merchandise seriously, whilst others only incur even greater losses by turning a blind eye to such things. Lets not make out we're unique in terms of losing money hand over fist and needing a rich owner to pay the bills. Pretty much everyone else is in the same boat. Only have to look at the Derby owner getting bored with chucking in tens of millions a year and missing out on promotion.

If we are going down the DofF route (which I personally think is the only way with our absentee owners and lack of footballing nous on the board) then the person employed as DofF needs to be someone with experience and gravitas who has done the job elsewhere before. There's loads of people out there who have filled those positions at top European and English clubs. It isn't a job for a rookie or converted manager who fancies a change in career. Even when we seemed to be going down that route with Senior his credentials were dubious.

It's quite laughable that the most likely club to get a points deduction (though still waiting on that front) is Birmingham City, for the 'crime' of investing recklessly into new players, yet Bolton have for the last 3 years continually faced winding up petitions, unpaid tax bills, unpaid wages, been on the cusp of administration/liquidation and have signed players seemingly under false pretences (Forest Green Rovers). Which 'crime' is greater? The club with owners with ambition and cash to invest or the club with all sorts of dodgy goings on who don't pay tax or their players and staff? Meanwhile Bolton are still not facing any league sanctions, are still in theory in with a chance of survival. Ludicrous.

I consider the 'turning point' in our season to have been the double header v Preston and Wigan away back in late November. Up to that Preston game we'd been generally hard to beat (playing 17 league games and impressively only losing 3 games v Bristol, Swansea and Sheffield United). Since and including Preston away we've played 21 league games. We've won 6 of those v Millwall, Ipswich, Hull, WBA, Wigan and Sheff Wed. We've lost 12 of them. We've conceded 39 goals and scored 31. We've led in 11 of those games, but only gone on to win 6 of them. Likewise we came from behind at Rotherham and Reading yet immediately let it slip. However you want to portray it our performance in every facet of the game since the end of November has been poor. The only reason we aren't up to our necks in relegation trouble was some momentum carried over from last season and a 4 game winning streak in January. December, February and March have been extremely poor. What is clear is that whilst we should survive this season, the fact we are even talking about survival after where we were in January speaks volumes, any continuation of the horrors we've seen since November (effectively 17 out of our last 21 league games ignoring the purple patch in January) and we're going to be in a big mess come next season. The trouble is that there's no obvious solution. We're struggling in numerous aspects - we're defensively shocking, we're over reliant on 2-3 people to score our goals, we can't hold a lead - so there's numerous areas to work on and over 4 months we've shown we're unable to change it in house - there can be only two solutions - a radical change to coaching methods over the summer - or a change in personnel (playing or coaching) - or sit back, do nothing and hope things work out for the best.

Anyone know why we don't have a proper pre-kickoff warm up routine? The majority of sides we play against come out of the tunnel before each kick off and go over to the touchline and do a quick routine of stepping over cones etc. Meanwhile our team tend to just stand around waiting, having a quick talk or individually stretching. I don't know how much difference it makes but certainly observing from a distance it looks like one side is drilled and has a routine to follow to get them ready for kick off and the other doesn't.

You're brave if going with a midfield of Travis, Davenport and Buckley who between them have a handful of senior first team appearances. Davenport not exactly pulling up any trees in the reserves, Buckley only just had a cameo in the team.

Those 2 wins at the end were dead rubbers against Rotherham away (who had pulled off the great escape under Warnock) and Reading at home (going nowhere). The reality is that Lambert and Mowbray are very similar in terms of their CVs. People tend to like Mowbray more because he dragged us out of League One and comes across better in his interviews in terms of being a more friendly persona and more accessible to fans. The difference of course being that Lambert at the time had the ability to walk out of here when he was mucked around by the owners and get another Championship job, whereas Mowbray was in last chance career saloon when he came here, so is less able to chuck his toys out of the pram when faced with issues with the owners. I don't think Mowbray has done anything Lambert couldn't have done if he had been here and don't think we would have been relegated had Lambert been here for a full season instead of Coyle/Mowbray. Even Lambert appears to have begun to stop the rot at Ipswich with some impressive draws recently. Being hard to beat is the cornerstone of any side going anywhere which is why I'm so disappointed at the ease with which we concede and are swept aside by poor teams.

Downing is a League One player. A good pro who was reliable for us last season in League One but that's his level and good luck to him. He wants to play football and has ended up with Doncaster Rovers. Previously at Walsall and MK Dons. There's a difference between him being around the place to step in when we're short on numbers and not let us down and then him being a competent Championship CB for 180-270 minutes a week. Of course it was lunacy to allow him to leave on loan given the lack of experienced alternatives but that's another argument. Ideally we'd have 2-3 proper Championship CBs.

I don't think LB will be changed after giving Williams a new deal, him making the breakthrough to the Ireland squad and Bell being signed by Mowbray only 12 months ago. I don't think RB will be significantly changed as Mowbray will keep Nyambe there with someone else filling in as and when. I can see 1 new CB being signed, probably to replace Rodwell/Downing when their contracts expire. I can see another 2-3 midfielders. One to replace Reed, one to replace Conway. I can see a new CF however I can't see significant funds being spent on that area as Venkys will expect Graham, Brereton, Armstrong and Nuttall to all be sufficient for the job. So there's probably 5 new players with the same going out again. Wages wise we'll probably stand still.