I suspect not many of us in a similar situation managing in Denmark would get exactly the right nuance in Danish. Who knows what he thinks he means but it is his second (or third) language.

I think this is the most likely situation.

Is the pitch wider this year?

MoM

I’ll be surprised if Gally is still here in Sept.

Noticeably quicker in moving the ball forward, Ayala especially seems to like the one touch stuff. Brittain is so much better than Nyambe going forward, he did two things Nyambe can’t do in the attack that gained the corner. I’ve actually been quite impressed by Hedges, gets everywhere and good awareness. Ben did two things, a decent shot and a great one. I can’t see Pickering and Gallagher staying in this team long, they just aren’t equipped for what the manager wants.

An even better way of boosting the atmosphere IMO would be to close the concourse bars at 2.45 to get fans into their seats and able to start goading the away fans before the teams come out. Back in the day, games against Bolton effectively started at 11.30 when an endless convoy of pissed up Neanderthals clogged up the roads through Darwen and Tockholes. I seem to recall @Claytons Left Boot selflessly sacrificing his lunchtime meat and potato pie against a coach window to let the occupants know they weren’t welcome.

On the other hand, going once every couple of years - which is my average - you’d expect to be more struck by the changes yet I find the match-going experience a lot more similar and familiar than virtually every other aspect of being in the town. As the video posted earlier by Arbitro showed: the ground still looks like a spaceship from the future landed in Ewood. The building has aged for sure, but then it is 30 years old and seems to suffer more from badly planned architecture than anything else eg the stained brickwork. I guess having spent my youth in crowds of 6,000, I’m still amazed how far away we have to park these days. Ewood might not look quite as good as when it was unveiled, but it has aged a lot better than The Manxman! Anyway, new boss, new era, new tactics, feels as big a change as when Furphy arrived. 3-1 (Field, Eccles, Arentoft)

Any on the field Law changes the less alert of us might have also missed Tony?

Naaah, everyone at every level gets scouted to death these days - how did Spurs know about Ash Phillips before you and me? Jacob obviously didn’t impress anyone with his games in the U23s, and paying £500k for him was rash to say the least.

I’m getting the impression the club thinks the kids given squad numbers the other day are a generational wave of first-team bound talent like we haven’t seen since the 1959 Youth Cup winners. Which would be nice.

16 OUT, 1 IN 🙀🙀 Davenport not been snapped up, given he was cruelly mismanaged by Mowbray…?

Wouldn’t surprise me if we see a Furphy/Kendall first season from JDT: dreadful start as players and manager suss each other out then a long unbeaten run to get us in the mix.

Fair enough. Why wouldn’t we?

Still not hearing you accept that the logical consequence of your rock-bottom opinion of Mowbray is an all-round, substantial improvement under the next guy…. Buckley was wasted as a false 9; I think he will be far more effective than Rothwell, pinging 30-yard through balls in the half the time it took Joe to complete his QE2-style turning semi-circle, and most will find their man as opposed to Joe running into five defenders. Whoever replaces Buckley’s more forward position will bag a lot more goals than our serial sitter-misser managed. I always felt Nyambe was bigged up on here as another Mowbray criticism, and it seems the rest of the football world agreed. Anyway, just think how worried you’d be if Mowbray was still here…!

Most of which came from set pieces, of which he took almost all of them. Whoever takes them this season I expect to do better - Rothwell’s were OK but not deadly, and we will be practising them this season…

I think you are still discounting how much better the ones who didn’t leave will perform. Plus, the “10 out, 1 in” is just yet another BRFCS doom mantra imo. To my mind, we have already replaced Nyambe and Rothwell with better - I’d wager Brittan will surpass Nyambe’s career Rovers assists by Easter and Buckley, if he takes the set pieces, will surpass Rothwell’s goals and assists from last year. Markandy seemingly doesn’t count as new because of his 15 minutes at Hull, and we are better off without Davenport and that slow bearded twat. If we start with Ayala and Wharton in the middle of a back four, it doesn’t matter in the short term that Lenihan and JPVH left. We need depth but not for the first few games. Bottom line: I fully expect that the fitter, better coached, more motivated, more cohesive team we put out on Saturday would beat a Mowbray team from last year 8/9 times out of 10. Don’t you?

Considering how relentlessly negative you were about all things Mowbray, I’m surprised you refer to the new gaffer being any better as “a gamble” - you were chief dice-roller while Mowbray was here!

I think there’s a misunderstanding as to what Rich Sharpe does, which is not to print gossip a la Nixon who gets 95% of it wrong. He only prints news that has been confirmed, which will always be later than any gossip that preceded it, especially as the club clearly doesn’t like gossip getting out. Alf Thornton only broke transfer news because there was no internet, although maybe Ron Kennedy always scooped him first.

So how much did Travis sign up on for four years? A tad more than £3.5k I’ll wager. Seems like we didn’t want to bust a gut to keep him, something our new manager could surely have intervened on if he had rated him. And it seems like not many others did either.

I’ve formed the impression that the “niggles” are the manager being politically correct on behalf of Dacky. I suspect he either can’t or has been too nervous to put in the intensity now required. To those who have seen any of the friendliest: is our pre-match warm-up routine much different to Mowbray’s?

The only one that made no sense to me Tony was not taking £6 million for Rothwell at Christmas, now that was madness. Nyambe, the market has decided, wasn’t worth much at all if the best club that will take him for free is Wigan. Lenihan I think should have moved - his last shot at a big contract. If he’d stayed and Phillips takes his place in a years time, then we’d have been paying £1.1m/year for a benchwarmer. So many counter-factual scenarios, only one of which was selling all 3 for £10 million and that money being reinvested. Maybe we wouldn’t have spent any of it but still own the training ground, who knows under these clowns? Obviously the outcome looks bad, but then getting a headline £15 million for a player who, it turns out, was perhaps really worth 1/3rd of that, has turned out to be daylight robbery in our favour.

C’mon Simon, we lost 40 goals last year with Armstrong and Elliott and Bucko was just a lightweight kid who needed a loan, allegedly. The biggest reason for optimism in my mind is that whoever we bring in is being brought in because they play the system the manager wants. None of the “needing to learn the way we play” nonsense.

Until then however, what? Seemingly wallow in moaning on here every day? It obviously deeply matters to you who we have on the books on July 18th, but how good were we looking this day last year? Armstrong was halfway out the door, no one had any idea Brereton would score 20 by Xmas and JPVH was nowhere in sight (plus branded as an untested kid when he rocked up in Sept.) The Armstrong hole looked a lot bigger a year ago than the Nyambe hole does today imo.

His big strength is defending against a winger running at him with the ball. His defensive positional awareness is, imo, poor. The players who do well against him do so because he has no idea where they are.