Well, a number of players are making a determined bid to be excluded from any future 18.

And Armstrong cannot score

Rovers penalty won by Dack

Sheff U ten changes but still a formidable line-up.

Statement by C&N, the frustrated bidders for Bury. In other words, Bury is an unmitigated disastrous mess which nobody could disentangle sensibly. It seems as though all kinds of additional problems surfaced in the closing due diligence.

David Conn BREAKING: Bury FC Crisis: The proposed purchase by C & N Sporting Risk is OFF; owner Steve Dale was given until 5pm today for it to complete or the club would be expelled from the Football League, so this really could be the end.

Anyone's guess. There are undoubtedly poison pills in the equation otherwise the Administrator would have cleared previous ownerships out of the picture by now. Chances of a deal have gone from close to zero to around 50% for any rescue. FV remain in the driving seat but there is clearly something in the deal which is beyond their pain threshhold or otherwise they would have done the deal by now. If the new bidder prevails, the League are going to have to extend their deadline because there is no way the paperwork can be read through, checked and executed in a day no matter how well prepared they are. Inevitably with the level of complexities involved the two deals on offer will not be carbon copies with different names on the top. A lot of people will be trying to compare apples and pears at the moment. If one deal is obviously the better, then the person offering that deal is over paying.

The administrator said only one bidder met all the requirements. That was then, this is now. Administrator is legally obliged to talk to everyone who shows interest. They usually deter tire kickers by charging a fee- typically a few thousands- to give access to the sale prospectus.

New bidders are alleged to have shown proof of funds of £33m. As I keep explaining, they will have done 99% of the necessary work in private IF they are serious. I saw a £55bn corporate take over hijacked in a week by similar means. The fact all is currently quiet at both clubs means serious talking is happening.

Money is money. Why take on a £7m obligation when with extreme brinkmanship you can probably duck it? The Administrator's announcements at the weekend were clearly dancing to the Football Ventures' tune. This latest one is much more neutral. As for the second bidder. If they are for real, they will have done a huge amount of work thus far but again will only be showing their hand at the 59th minute of the 11th hour when all else is exhausted.

Appears another bidder with proof of £33m has come in for Bolton. With two bidding the future for Bolton looks a lot brighter. Bury on the other hand...

See the David Conn article I posted on page 19 of this thread. Bury are not in administration but in Creditors' Voluntary Arrangement which makes unhooking that mortgage with an effective interest rate of 138% a killer.

I cannot find the link but I read somewhere they could apply at sixth tier level. No guarantee they would be admitted- it would be by vote of National Leagues' member clubs. Failing that, it would be at the very bottom as you say.

If they play for either club, and they'd played for Rovers, they could not be loaned out again this season. If they hadn't already played professionally for Rovers they would face the choice of either Rovers or another loan but could not do both. All academic now anyway.

We have two suspensions from the Under 23s game v Wolves as well. A bit provocative putting us in Sheffield Wednesday stripes!

Deadline day. Killer issues - Bury has that horrific mortgage over Gigg Lane. Nobody will touch that. - Bolton has the problem of having an associated asset of value in the hotel which in these circumstances is a horrible complicating factor for getting a deal done for a football club. Plus the scrap between the Davies Estate and Ken Anderson over a £7 million debt is another massive complication. An incoming owner has to decide whether certain relegation this season (and all the supporter animosity that comes with that) and a few million wasted on legacy issues is less attractive than picking up the pieces from a liquidation and starting afresh in National League North next season. I suspect the latter is more appealing as there is zero legacy and they would be building their cost base under their own control from zero rather than inheriting God knows what. As you can tell, I will be surprised if either club is still with us by the end of September. So I repeat, what are Rovers doing to expand our supporter base into the resulting voids?

League 1 clubs are still within a window. Suppose Rovers loaned players to Bury and Bolton and they played for them and the clubs collapse. Those players are pretty well stuck for what they can do in the remainder of the season. Rovers could not recall them from a replacement loan to cover a crisis at Ewood.

Rules limiting the number of clubs a player can appear with in a season have completely stymied the ability of other clubs to help.

Administrator of Bolton has confirmed there is no basis on which to continue operating beyond tomorrow night. Football Ventures are the only bidder who meet all criteria. Some serious nerve testing going on between Anderson, Davies' Estate and Football Ventures over an historic £7m debt. If I were Football Ventures, I'd be telling the others go whistle for their £7m and I guess that is the point on which the deal broke. Meanwhile at Bury... Bury’s demise is a grim warning that small-town Britain is being left behind David Conn When I was growing up, Gigg Lane glowed with local charm. Now the club’s plight may be prophetic for a neglected region Mon 26 Aug 2019 16.26 BSTLast modified on Mon 26 Aug 2019 17.16 BST ‘The ruins of Bury FC expose the wider vulnerability of its surrounding town and many places like it around the country. It is hard not to see the parallels with Brexit’ Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA The threatened expulsion of small town Bury from the English Football League – which could happen if the owner, Steve Dale, does not conclude a sale of the club by 5pm on Tuesday – has been a touch more emotional for me than many of the football traumas I have investigated as a journalist over the past 20 years. I grew up in north Manchester, five miles down the road, and went to school in Bury. Twice a day I used to pass the club’s Gigg Lane ground and wonder at it from the top of the 35 bus: a proper football home, bedded in with all its history behind a pleasing line of trees. In these crisis-stricken months for Bury, a club founded in 1885, many people have rightly pointed with bewilderment to English football’s violent inequalities; to Manchester City and United 10 miles away, owned by overseas billionaires, making multimillionaires of their players and managers. Supporters have despaired at the gaping holes in football’s governance, its painfully limited “fit and proper persons test” for owners, so long campaigned for but that still fails to protect beloved clubs from needless ruination. Since the coalition government formed in 2010, Bury council has suffered cuts of £85m, 61% of its annual budget But the details of Bury’s crumbling expose an alarming, knacker’s-yard wreckage that is more broadly worrying for the economies of Britain’s old industrial places at this time of imminent national shock. Football, the national sport, has always reflected the country and its times. When Bury, Bolton, Blackburn, Preston and other north-west and Midlands towns formed the late-Victorian professional clubs, they were powerhouses of mills and manufacturing. The former public schoolboys who founded the Football Association in London in 1863 remained amateurs and opposed professionalism for years – partly because they did not need the money to compensate them for time off to train and play. Today, the ruins of Bury FC expose the wider vulnerability of its surrounding town and many places like it around the country on the brink of Brexit: a disruption engineered by politicians who never took the bus to school, apparently incubating extreme ideologies for a country from which they were always kept detached. Bury’s financial instability was evident for five years under the previous owner, Stewart Day, a Blackburn-based property developer specialising in accommodation blocks for students. In 2014 his company borrowed money secured on Gigg Lane at 10% interest a month, which compounded into 138% annual interest. That, sadly, did not clang enough alarm bells and Day continued building his flats, and loading borrowings on to Bury, until it all collapsed. Joy Hart, former director at Bury FC, locks herself to a drainpipe near Gigg Lane in protest against the club’s owner. Photograph: Harry McGuire/The Guardian When he announced in December that he had sold the club to Dale, for £1, Day said he wanted to spend more time with his family, while Dale spoke of it as a philanthropic venture. Day’s financial difficulties were laid bare within weeks, as his companies fell into insolvency and administration. Some people involved in new or expanding universities in northern former mill towns have described their growth as economic regeneration, but it has always seemed shaky to base a recovery on government-backed loans taken out by young people facing uncertain futures. Day’s property ventures were not even supported by banks; he had borrowed heavily from Lendy, a model based on attracting money from thousands of individual investors, which has itself collapsed and is now subject to a Financial Conduct Authority investigation. Day also pre-sold individual flats, promising guaranteed returns from students’ rent payments, and many investors are now distraught at seeing life savings lost. At Bury itself, loans now up to £3.7m, secured on Gigg Lane, were taken from an outfit called Capital Bridging Finance Solutions, based in Crosby, with 40% commissions paid to still-unnamed third parties as introduction fees. The publicly filed documents state that Capital in turn mortgaged Bury’s ground to a company registered in Malta, whose own lenders for the deal were eight companies domiciled in the offshore tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. Perhaps you have to know and have been to Gigg Lane, a football haven amid terraced streets just off Manchester Road, to feel in your guts the ludicrous nature of such house-of-cards economics. A further look at Dale’s business record revealed a trader in insolvent companies that had mostly been dissolved or liquidated. Any philanthropic intentions were overtaken by his voluble complaining at the financial hole vacated by Day. On the way to Bury’s own insolvency Dale laid off hardworking staff and failed to pay £4m of creditors including £1.1m to HMRC, as well as players who are still owed substantial back wages. Bury’s council leader, David Jones, told the Guardian last week that losing the club would be a “nail in the coffin” for the town. Since David Cameron and Nick Clegg formed their coalition government in 2010, the council has suffered cuts of £85m, 61% of its annual budget, he said. Boris Johnson is now presenting a no-deal Brexit as easy to cope with, when the government’s own assessment is that the north-west’s already patchy and unequal economy will suffer a -12% hit. That is the broader context of the Bury collapse and its defining image: the former director Joy Hart, chaining herself to a drainpipe outside the club’s closed offices, pleading for salvation.

But that is no excuse for Rovers management not using an enlightened marketing campaign to try to attract another few thousand. Compare proximity maps with and without Bolton and Bury and Rovers' catchment area dramatically increases. I bet Andy Holt at Stanley won't be sitting this out without doing something to win over Bury fans.

I would certainly play a strong side to see how we do against Prem opposition. Albeit most players are familiar from last season including their signings. Jonson looking leggy so I'd consider playing Tosin alongside Travis as cover for the back four. Keep Williams/Lenihan going.

I disagree, I remember meeting Bolton fans quite frequently at Ewood when Bolton were playing away. Is there capacity at OT or the Etihad for more fans/? No I'd send a voucher for two free games at Ewood to everyone on the Bolton and Bury databases together with a suitably sombre letter of sympathy and urging small town team support.

I am not ITK but I would wager Nixon's number 2 is Bassini recycled like a bad penny. Rovers management should be preparing for the collapse of one or both.

I will post this here as well as in the Bolton thread. Our neighbours in Bolton and Bury are tragically going to the wall tomorrow. That's around 16,000 regular home supporters between them. Drog's long dreamed of Lancashire United. What are we going to do to welcome them to Ewood? .

The sale collapsed Saturday morning. With no apparent sign of any other bidder the administrator has no option but liquidation following the inevitable expulsion of Bolton tomorrow. They are our nearest neighbour and Bury is not that far away. What are we going to do to make those who want to be welcome at Ewood?