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.

On Saturday a number of people around me reacted with horror/confusion/outrage when people in the BBE started singing anti-Venky chants whilst we were 4-1 up. It seemed to me that the prevailing view of those people was that there was no reason or justification for such chants because the team was doing well and that it was inappropriate to be singing such things whilst we were hammering the opposition. I struggled to understand the thought process there. I understand if you don't agree with anti-Venky chanting or noise full stop but I'm not sure why anyone would base their view on how the team is performing at any given time. The whole point to this is that the owners need to go and that applies regardless of how the team is doing. Linking it to team performance is exactly what they want to happen so they can brush it off as anger about results and not the existential crisis they have placed the club in.

Maybe we can, maybe we can't. Suppose that depends on how badly they need income from tickets and how willing / able they are to plug the gap with money from other sources. I agree, probably irrelevant to them what supporters do and how many buy tickets. My hope was and remains that the Indian legal system and authorities can force them to sell.

They still have this archaic and frankly weird personal trust thing, where they don't trust anyone other than a select few individuals who are usually underqualified or unqualified for the job but get it because they are nice people or Venkys trust them. We saw it with the Kean and Anderson shenanigans at the start, we've seen it with Bowyer and Mowbray getting into their good books and being trusted to get on with it for a while. We've seen it with the curtain twitcher and Waggott trusted to look after it for a while. They'll never go into the world market and headhunt or identify a proven operator. Two reasons. One is that such a person would expect certain things - strategy, direction, autonomy - none of which they are willing to provide - another reason is that they aren't actually looking for a CEO and never have - they are looking for a yes man, box ticker, puppet. Someone who will be grateful for the position, prawn sandwiches and pretending to be a CEO, but in practice just carrying out the shadow man's directions and playing the Venky game whilst providing a facade to the media and fans that there is some normality here. So what we are seeing with Gestede is the old 'trust building' process whereby they ensure that he is the sort they like and then they can plonk him into position in the directors box wearing his fancy suit and talking a good game and that's all there is to it.

Why can't we just operate like a normal football club / organisation? At any other operation of this size there would not be some drawn out succession / apprenticeship where Waggott creeps towards retirement and then by the time he goes Gestede has been groomed to take over from him. You'd just go out into the big wide world and recruit a proven operator qualified to drive the club forwards. In 15 years these owners have never wanted or taken seriously the need for a proper executive, and that obviously remains the case today. Nobody will persuade me otherwise that the only reason Waggott turned up and got the job was because Uncle Tony knew him from Coventry and recommended/supported his appointment to the head honchos. Too much of a coincidence otherwise. Even if you ignore Waggott's dismal track record and performance at the club it has been obvious for years that his time must be limited - he's 71 soon - the club has had years to plan for his departure / replacement and they are unsurprisingly going to respond to it by appointing Rudy work experience Gestede to the top job so that he can work in tandem with the curtain twitcher. You wouldn't get such shenanigans at non-league clubs. I hope people remember this when they start attempting to convince themselves and others that Venkys have learned hard lessons and were once badly advised but are now doing things correctly. Absolutely laughable.

Fortunately for the stooges Ismael is only approaching his first transfer window with them, so they can string him along like they did with JDT and Eustace - vague promises of jam tomorrow, good budgets, reinvestment - he will only realise come September that they are liars and bullshitters - just like JDT and Eustace came to realise after 1-2 transfer windows - they won't care by September as they'll have banked the transfer and season ticket cash and won't need to worry about spending anything until January. Another year on the gravy train complete.

Serious organisations let their actions do the talking. Here of course there is a distinct lack of action and not much by way of talking, although when we do hear from them it is all excuses and future plans/intentions nothing more than that. The last thing most of us want to see or hear is any of the revolting stooges or their employers. I'd rather never see or hear from any of them ever again, but whilst they occupy positions of power at this Club they need to act appropriately, which they certainly aren't doing. That failure to act properly is the source of the anger and trouble, not their failure to communicate.

Here's how it goes. We are operated by charlatans and snake oil salesmen who are rewarded based on how much cash they save the Indians. The idea of rewarding players with improved or extended contracts where those players receive higher wages, signing on fees, improved terms, when those players ultimately remain under contract (for now) is the very antithesis of what these people are all about. To them it isn't a problem that needs sorting. They are under contract, and these people see no reason to increase costs by offering them new ones now (or many months ago). A slippery character like Waggott, lower than a snake's belly, and whoever else is involved in these things behind the scenes, are not interested in medium to long term consequences of their actions/inactions - if you doubt this then just look at our ticketing and commercial policies over the last few years. It is all about the here and now and immediate cash flow. They'll screw the hardy few fans for every penny, including via blackmail schemes (1875 club, more on that below) and the players get similar treatment, the only benefit they get is they are paid for their part in this fiasco and can simply walk off elsewhere at the end of their terms. I also reckon they like to play a game of brinkmanship with the players - making a point - forcing them to wait - and expecting the player/agent to cave in later on and accept whatever garbage terms the club are offering. Some will, usually the academy graduates grateful for a shot at Championship football, those who are coming to the end of their careers and are grateful to keep playing in the Championship. But prime years of career people like Travis, Tronstad, Carter, Brittain? No chance, their agents will know there's far better out there than being mucked around here. Oh yeah, the 1875 club perks. These are the benefits for your £25 fee: 1x 10% off Roverstore goods (excluding Macron products) - general tat aside from the Macron kits and training gear Discount on selected match tickets - any spring to mind? Discount on selected women's matches 10% discount on all matchday hospitality (excluding Jack's kitchen) - not much use to your average fan 10% discount on 'non matchday club events' - how many of these have there been? Exclusive competitions - can't remember seeing any? Monthly newsletter - don't remember seeing anything since last year Once they've got your money they fail to deliver their side of things, we've seen that throughout.

"I really like to play here. I like the players and fans, the club in general, and the league. I would like to stay." Tronstad on pre-match media duty today. Good news, if we were a functioning club worthy of the name. Bad news for Gestede and co, because there goes the excuse they were hoping to rely on that Tronstad has family and roots abroad and that he's set on a move back to the continent. It was obvious in the 3 stooges' interview that they were starting to prepare for that being trotted out as the excuse for him 'refusing' to sign a new deal. Looks like they'll just have to resort to the old 'greedy player/agent' one instead.

We know for sure that over the last few years there has been a significant cut in the amount of money coming out of India to fund the club. Now that might be because the owners simply would rather not send it, it might be that they are unable to send as much as the once did, it might be that the stooges are advising them they don't need to send as much because they can get the club washing its own face and in return get hefty bonuses and perks from the savings they achieve. End result is the same - less cash moving from India to Rovers. They've got away with it the last few years by demolishing the squad and selling off the family silver. Low hanging fruit stuff. You don't need to have a particular set of skills to flog an Adam Wharton or Sammie Szmodics off the back of JDT's outstanding work in nurturing them. You just need to ride on the coat-tails of the coaching staff work, sell them, get a pat on the back from the money men. That little party is coming to an end now, because best case, and it probably relegates us to League One, is they sell off the remaining few assets for a combined few million. However you view buying or not buying a season ticket, or whether you consider it significant in the scheme of things, it all comes back to the same source - Venkys and their ability/willingness to keep funding this. The music is slowing and pretty soon someone is going to be left holding a time-bomb. At best they can stave it off by going to India cap in hand for more money. Maybe the morons in India will simply cough up and keep the party going, maybe they can't/won't any more, and then this wretched monstrous regime comes crashing down for good.

He wants to play 'at the highest level' and of course knows that isn't going to be possible staying here. Says it all given the positions we have been in the last 3 Januarys. When he rocks up at a Stoke or Derby some people at Rovers might consider that to be vindication that he 'wasn't much good anyway' but I'd argue a lad established at this club who would rather join a rival Championship side is the most concerning thing here. Plus we know that whoever we get to replace him will likely be inferior or not our player.

Struggling to think of any other industry or business in the world where paying customers are expected to hand over hundreds of pounds of their money every year to witness that business be deliberately or negligently run into the ground and provide an ever deteriorating product. Where the ownership and management of that business give not a single solitary toss about the views of any of these paying customers and will not shift their approach in the slightest to try and improve, grow, advance the business, quite the opposite infact, they'll do just about everything they can to hinder and restrict it. The regime owning and running this organisation would long ago have delivered total collapse or destruction in any other industry. Yet in football it just starts again in the summer for another year of more. Where everyone, from employees, players, down to fans are treated with nothing but disrespect and contempt, yet come renewal time it's over to those people to come up with the cash so that bonuses can be collected next time around. 'No brainer' seems like a good description of this to me but probably for very different reasons.

Only a few years ago the favourite 'go to' clubs for the naysayers were Derby and Bolton 'Look what we could become if we changed ownership, we'd go the same way as them' They've had to give up on those now that both clubs are in better financial and structural health than us, are getting far better crowds every week, know how to renew contracts and aren't having their coaching staff poached off teams below them in the table. Fortunately the Bury example can still be trotted out although worth noting they are still in existence and they are upwardly mobile - set to clinch another promotion this weekend and expecting over 7000 fans on Gigg Lane to witness it. Their gates are better than times in the Football League and I'd wager they'll be back in the Football League before we are rid of Venkys or see the top division again.