They're probably safe, too many teams below them that need to pick up points. It would be highly gratifying to stay up at their expense though! The good thing about that result though is it means Leicester still have some fight left, and they've still got to play West Ham.

And that's absolutely fine for youth team recruitment. Those are players who took years to come good. A head of recruitment needs to also be able to sign first team ready players. Wrong about Buckley btw, he's been with us since he was 6. He's Manchester born, that might be what you're thinking of.

I know someone who is worse offensively and defensively, and is also lightweight but lacks the fight to make up for it. He starts every week ahead of Adam and his name is Tyler.

Pretty sure I've seen JB himself admit he doesn't have a good track record.

Finished 2-1 to Fulham. Handy, keeps Wolves a point below us with same games played. If they dick their last 2 games up it won't matter what we or anyone else does.

So he has had a few years of being a scout, sending reports to someone else but not making the decisions himself? I wouldn't say that qualifies him for the post, not at a club like ours. In fact if one of those gigs was at Celtic, he may have worked under our previous head of recruitment John Park? This isn't an area we should skimp in. Relative to players, these sorts of roles don't cost us much, but the cost of bad recruitment vs good recruitment is immense. It's a false economy to get someone inexperienced because they're cheap.

Eh?

All I want to know is, has this guy been in charge of recruitment at senior level elsewhere? If he hasn't, he shouldn't be getting near this job. If he has, what was his track record?

Weird comment. Why would the Assistant Academy Manager be responsible for recruiting £5 million strikers? Is it just meant to be a really poor quality nonsensical joke?

They were dropped because they were playing badly on match days. Wharton wasn't.

City have won the league now, so they might not be fully motivated playing against us (or Wolves).

You don't get points for training ground performances. Of course training matters, and following tactics matters, etc. But I don't see anything from Wharton when he plays in situations where points are on the line, that suggests he doesn't work hard enough or causes any detriment to the team. Mark Hughes was a notoriously poor trainer, but a proper winner on matchdays. Would you honestly rather have someone playing on matchdays who is great at training, but crap on matchdays, over someone who is crap in training but great on matchdays? That doesn't make any logical sense. And that's if we even believe the suggestions that Morton is great in training and Wharton isn't. Wharton was BRFCS man of the match against Norwich, which is what I said. https://brfcs.com/magazine/football/match/881187/blackburn-norwich?tab=voting

I'm sure Everton have valuable players they can sell to fund some purchasing. I doubt the owners would refuse to sanction any spending and only sales, because the bounty on offer for returning to the Prem is enormous. If they stay in this league they'll only lose even more money. I'm not that familiar with their financial or ownership situation though. But they'll have enough value in playing assets I'm sure they could afford to sell several, hugely reduce their wage bill, and still have money to buy quality players for this level. I think a Burnley situation is much more likely than a Sunderland one. They're a bigger club than either. This would be the first time they haven't been in the Prem. Whatever anyone says, I'll be afraid of them if they come down until shown otherwise.

I certainly think we should have been able to spare about 2 million or so for a new striker. Sometimes it's easier said than done though, and you can't find anyone for the price you have in mind or who you think represents value for money. There's no point spending for the sake of it, or doing a bad deal. That said, I think there's been a real failure of imagination at the club for a while, the transfer market being no exception. You would hope now there's a settled system and a DoF, that can start to change, but so far they've still failed to bring in a striker. A couple of other points though. I'm not sure things have been less financially pressing since, that would be one for the people more familiar with the accounts, but from what I've heard the last few years we seem to just scrape under the limits each year. The wage bill is meant to have been reduced considerably though, so maybe that can start to change. Also, the sounds from the club do suggest we've 'looked to do it', but that we've failed. They've talked about missing out on striker targets near deadline day for the last few windows I think. Of course, you don't win any prizes for trying to sign players, and it's even possible it's just been smoke and mirrors, but we can't categorically rule out that they've tried. The failings may be incompetence on our behalf (some history to back that up) or budgetary constraints (history for that too). Another thing to consider is that the training ground sale didn't happen til what, March? Knowing the poor lines of communication between India and Blackburn, those running the club over here may not have known that was on the cards, and just seen an impending deficit in the books that was about 10 million over our FFP limits. This would reduce what they felt they could allow for signings. None of this is to say it's acceptable, many of these problems stem from a lack of competency, imagination, planning and structure at the club, often starting in India. The contract rebel situations in particular have been costly, probably costing us something in the region of 30 mill in player assets (another 5 for Arma if he was fully contracted, 15 ish for BBD, 10 ish for Rothwell, Lenihan and Nyambe combined). It could be less but however you slice it, it's a lot for us. Thankfully Diaz's emergence took some of the goal burden away for a while, but now he's off the boil and leaving in the summer. Unless Leonard starts smashing in goals (and probably even if he does) it's imperative we sign a decent striker in the summer no matter what league we're in. If we have to trade to make it happen then so be it.

3-3 between West Ham and Palace now, into the 85th minute.

Could've done without that, although my eyes are mostly on Spurs, West Ham was one more side with the potential to finish below us. 3-2 now though I see.

Some talk about how we didn't reinvest after selling Armstrong, and I'm not saying we shouldn't have spent a little to do so, but if I remember rightly we barely passed that year's FFP as it was, and I think that was including 'selling' our training ground for another 15 mill ish.

In a midfield anything he does well. As I've said before, I only care how a player performs on matchday, not how they perform in training, and on that count Adam has shown he is the best we have and he should be playing. It's insanity that he picked up man of the match on this site after a 20 minute cameo, had another fine performance in the next match, then got dropped back to the bench. If we had picked up the win you could maybe excuse it, but we didn't, and we were poor again.

Gallagher has a one-year extension option also.

Doing that work will make him a better player still, but he's already the best in the midfield. I hope for being guided to the PL this season, but I think that ship will sail. We would have lost less ground if we had played Adam more though, I'm confident of that.

He doesn't need waking up, he's already the best midfielder we have.

Burnley had massive turnover of players too. Didn't turn out too badly for them.

I look at the teams at risk of going down, and I really, really want to get out of this league this year. If say, Everton were to go down, for me that's one of the promotion spots gone right away, their resources are too strong for this league regardless how they're playing currently in a better league. Most of the others have been established up there for a long time too. Could be a tough ole' year.

Yes well obviously it's not technically up to him (although in practice player power tells when someone insists they want out), but that wasn't the discussion. It was more about whether it would be best for him to stay or go.

So the manager barely plays him, but he should stay here? Again you're not actually giving any counter-argument Chaddy, you're just insisting he should stay without any reason. Yes, moving clubs can go wrong, it can also go right. You mentioned Connor Mahoney, well I could say look at Jack O'Connell. You say look at Jack Clarke, I could say look at Jude Bellingham. Patrick Roberts, ok, but also Harvey Elliott.