Sadly yes. I think a few player sales will be required in Jan. If the high court appearance is delayed in Feb as it was twice earlier in the year, we'll be struggling to pay bills in March/April.

Out of curiosity what exactly is your issue with Broughton?

We are now in the hands of the High Court who will hopefully agree that Venky's can send funds to pay our remaining invoices till the end of the season. The high court won't approve and funds for player purchases etc. Inorder to make any signings in January we need to fund them through player sales and even that might be tricky as the fixed wage budget means there is no flex. If a player leaves even for a large fee we have what their wage is to play. Also if we did sell a player for a large fee I can see the courts saying you should have used those funds to pay the bills instead of signing new players and reject the Feb request. It really is a depressing situation only of Venky's making. If they don't sell during this time they are never going to. They have the perfect excuse of issues with the Government and won't lose any face in the business community.

Thanks Glen and Mark for taking the time to do this. I do have a quick question in that something doesn't add up funding wise. Normally Venky's send through £20m a season to keep us running. So far this season we have received an upfront payment of the sponsorship of around £2m, we have received around £11m from the court order, £4m from transfers, reduced the wage budget by about £3-4m for the season and however much we received from the training ground loan. This should be more than enough to see us through to the end of the season, as I get well over £20m from these events. So would like to know why we need another trip to the high court for the second half of the season, it sort of hints we have built up a lot of unpaid bills up until October that we hadn't paid and had bigger cashflow problems than we thought we had.

At the moment it looks a poor signing, although he was free and probably on 3-4k a week. If he comes good in the next 6 months then you'll then be saying it was a great signing. It's the market we are in, we can't afford finished articles on either transfer fee or wages. The situation in India will be getting worse before it gets better, so can probably see a 20% budget cut again in Jan and a further 25% in the summer as well as raising funds through sales. So I think we need to prepare ourselves for lots more punts similar to the Ennis deal. Some will work and some won't, we just need to hope more come off than fail.

I didn't say 12 months to sort out fitness, I said 12 months for fitness and develop into a championship standard player. It is very similar to Sammie Szmodics, taking a year to get up to speed and then flourishing the next season. This is the pond we are fishing in now, take rough diamonds and polish into a good player. I assume as Sammie was signed on a 3 year deal, he'll be sold in the summer for us to maximize his resale potential.

He was signed as a development player before the severe budget cuts happened. If Venky's had put the restrictions in place in April he probably wouldn't have been signed. The 4 year contract was offered as they expected him to take 12 months to sort out his fitness and develop him to championship standard, the following season we would benefit and in 2 years sold on with a profit and 2 years remaining on his contract.

The £1.8m agent fees is a strange one, spend on agents is published by the EFL and for the last few seasons it's been around £500k a season and I can't see it being anywhere near that this season. So I am starting to think maybe agent fees includes other types of agents besides football ones such as people who have introduced Venture Capitalists for the training ground loan or funding advice /legal advice we are likely to need. One thing we can say is once the Indian Government sinks their teeth into this they will investigate every single payment the Venky's have sent to the UK and how it has been spent. It is going to be a very long and drawn out affair to say the least

Apologies fat fingers, should be TK.

With the sudden wage budget reduction and the fact that after Ayala and Dack had left, TM was our highest paid player, we can comfortably say he was going no matter what after June. It's debatable if things hadn't been cut would he have stayed?

I think we'll need the suitors to cover costs by January. It looks clear Venky's aren't likely to be sending through any more cash this year so we'll have to find a good chunk of change in January.

I would love to see what a proper 4-4-2 team could do with 2 fast wingers and 2 good Forwards who are not afraid to attack the ball, against today's sides. We seem to be losing a lot out of the game especially with young player development with these new rigid system approaches. I am sure a Duff, Gillespie, Ripley etc would never come through now, they would have the individuality drilled out of them. I don't even think we produce good quality strikers anymore through youth teams.

I think he'll be tasked with raising £10m in January to cover this year's running costs till end of May. So we can expect A. Wharton to be sold to probably Newcastle in January. Next summer will be interesting as we won't have anyone else to really sell. The recruitment team are really going to be up against it.

I would be good to turn a side over for a change, especially to improve our goal difference for later in the season.

It's probably a good job he was quick out of the blocks with 3 early signings or otherwise the summer would have been terrible. He must have enjoyed that call in mid June making him save £60k a week in wages and generate £5m in transfer income while also trying to fill out the numbers in the squad. We can complain about the players we have signed but generally there probably weren't many other options within our constraints.

Although we can probably add we know the £6m fine equals the amount our budget seems to have reduced by this season.

In reality we've got what we've paid for. It looks like we've generated £4m net in transfer fees and are saving somewhere in the the region of £50-60k a week in wages. So from a Venky's perspective they only need to inject £8-10m into the club this season. After generating those funds we could have easily afforded several good forwards. The problem of not being able to invest any of the savings is that we have gambled on probably our 10-12th choice options and need them to hit the ground running just to get numbers into the squad. At the beginning of the summer, GB and JDT had agreed on the players to go for and had brought 3 pretty good players in and were working on several forwards until the plug was pulled. Next summer they will most probably sell A. Wharton and allow £2m to be spent on players and not have to inject any funds into the club. What an opportunity Venky's have squandered.

Did he mention anything about all the rumours and how false they are? More to the point did he even know about the rumours?

I wouldn't object to a manager swap and appoint Ruud for ourselves really.

Apart from being on record saying he had to talk Venky's out of funding a back to back promotion push and instead go for consolidation and continual improvement. With Venky's it's all about interest and excitement with them. After the league 1 promotion they were interested and willing to bankroll a promotion push. After that first season back they have lost interest again. I am hoping JDT and Greg have managed to get them interested again so we'll have a reasonable budget this summer.

I see he is now saying it's never too early to gain promotion to the premier league, which is surprising after saying he had to calm Venky's down from going for a double promotion as we would be promoted too early in the journey. As we all know Venky's then lost interest.

At a normal club yes, but at Ewood, apart from the club shop, everything has been outsourced. We receive a set fixed amount per season so it doesn't have any impact on our income if 2,000 people turn up or 30,000.

A) I don't think they have fallen out, I think both are incredibly frustrated with how Jan turned out. he is very ambitious so it's a possibility. I think he knows we have a great academy and a lot of potential. Most of our players have now been tied down to new contracts by Greg (which I don't think would have happened with Waggot and his home grown wage limits), so it's up to JDT.

At the end of the day, everything is a symptom of the owners. More clued up and interested owners wouldn't have Waggot or Silvester working for the club. They also would have moved heaven and earth to get a striker in in Jan (increasing budget to do it if needed) and probably would have sorted O'Brien without any issues as well. A lot of the time we don't move quickly for players due to budget limitations.

Club secretary and he won't be fired.