It’s exceptionally difficult to write a fair piece on a manager that has vexed most of us with his mouth this week, as much as with his “performance” on Wednesday, but DE has nailed it here. A thoroughly enjoyable read

Rovers under the Venkys truly are the Mary Celeste of football clubs. We seem to get these moments, landmark but for all the wrong reasons, that arrive as sobering reminders that our football club is indeed owned by a completely ruinous, treacherous mob. Only not so much owned, as abandoned, cut adrift and left to decay as the most woebegone looking vessel you ever set your eyes upon. Frankly you’d have to be rainman to decipher what has been allowed to happen at our football club. When Kaminski hit the ground for the 7th time the other night, it was like hearing the thud of a spirited tiger blundered by a poacher. All this fanciful puff and stuff about grand plans on the horizon is risible and farcical cod psychology of the most trite variety, especially when you look up at the boardroom to see a complacent man in Waggot who was not so much appointed, as installed, like a toilet. The chronology of Venkys ownership is continually punctuated by errors, folly, obstinance, negligence and stupidity that have all proven fatal to the clubs’ standing. Too many interlopers with questionable scruples and motives have held significant weight at Rovers and it has perennially been to the detriment of the club. When these troubles engulf a club, it ultimately becomes the norm (unless regime change happens), as the existing fans grow weary of it and become estranged from their club, and have their absent voices replaced by a generation who’ve witnessed nothing but this. Hence a floundering manager in Mowbray has had carte blanche to tinker and experiment with frequently disastrous sequences of results….. and the bugger has had his own flag! The time has long since passed for positive changes to be implemented by this regime. Life under Venkys is habitually bad. 11 years of this. Why would it suddenly improve? It’s fanciful in the extreme. The Raos are simply appalling owners of this once proud, once successful, once happy, once trustworthy family football club. I personally get very little joy from my football club now. Victories still give me fleeting pleasure, but are almost comparable to winning a meat raffle while living with a terminal illness

The old adage that a fish rots from the head just rings so true with my beloved Rovers. I can only read with pure and absolute bemusement the various defences put up for the clubs’ owners. The whole club has been reduced and hollowed out to a completely pathetic, soulless, joyless tinpot charade. They have brutally depth charged the proud legacy of Jack Walker, so much so that chancers and carpet-baggers think they can exploit one of its preeminent components in the shape of Brockhall and the academy that has produced numerous players for the first team. Each one indeed a tribute to the foresight and endeavour of the great man himself. You know this lot should be frogmarched before a panel of fans and forced to answer many an uncomfortable question. Instead we have fans mounting pitiful defences for a pitiful regime. The notion that any discerning Rovers fan should feel even a scintilla of gratitude towards this wretched family is utterly demeaning, degrading, debasing and disparaging to the club - and is tantamount to defending an absent parent who pays maintenance for their children, but has absolutely no profound effect on their upbringing. Takeovers of football clubs by allegedly wealthy families are meant to generate buzz, excitement, pride. Here we are after a decade plus, and £282 million, exiting the brewery tour sober. It’s just a dire disheartening mess that never displays any appreciable sign of improvement. The Rao’s are to football ownership what wood-rot is to Pinocchio and the sooner this nausea is rung from the clubs’ brow - and consigned to the past - the better for Blackburn Rovers Football Club

The trouble is, this is a well-trodden route in the Copybook of Tony Mowbray. A week back, prior to Cardiff and following the utterly woeful and woebegone showings against Wigan and Barnsley, we needed to see a late and sustained charge. What did we get? Win one, draw one, lose one. In keeping with the season. In keeping with the managers record. That kind of infuriating and tiresome predictability just creates a detrimental staleness that engenders apathy amongst the ever diminishing fan base, and ensures that any player of talent and therefore ambition will not grace Ewood for long. Mowbray has done a solid job here but his usefulness expired long ago. The club needs an injection of something to really get it going again. We need some excitement and this familiar pattern of WDL is not going to create it. Let’s be completely and frankly honest here: you could have stuck a fork in Rovers’ “play off ambitions” before Mowbray uttered a word to the media about the seasons aims. Any notion that a push was on died like a louse in Roy Keane’s beard with any number of Walton’s catalogue of gaffes. A serious push cannot be built on such shifting sands. Last night was a disappointing, but entirely expected conclusion to a season that has been more grind than kind to us supporters. So much of the play churned out week after week is disarticulated and banal. Mowbray is a procrastinator and a manager with that habit is diametrically opposed to the club and indeed towns’ need for promotion back to the top flight. Tangible concerns have been flagged on here for a while now, which really does beg many pertinent questions. Primarily what are the owners hopes and aims for the club they’ve presided over for what must be its most lugubrious decade? Equally importantly, who within the corridors of Ewood has the expertise to deduce that the manager has ran out of ideas and indeed time? The answers, as ever, will not become clear, because it is abundantly evident that these questions are only on the agenda of supporters. The Rao family can be inculpated for many a sin against the club and us the fans. But these vacuums that they have created over the years, beginning with the power vacuum in the boardroom when John Williams was marginalised, through to today with the vacuum for just basic information about targets set, plans made etc. result in what we see on and off the pitch: a very cushy working environment where performance seems to be unquestioned, and fans are unsure what to even expect of their club anymore. There is not a trace of hunger for success at Ewood, and without that you have to ask “what is the point?”

Footballers are remarkably well remunerated in this day and age and it’s not an enviable task putting up a defence for them.... However. These are young men, many with young families. Coronavirus is a force majeure if ever there was one, and as such the clubs and ergo players should not be held to ransom to fulfil the remainder of the season, in a way so far removed from how intended, by the broadcasters. Players secrete blood, sweat and tears on the field of play; to say that a contact sport of this nature and so-called magnitude with huge stakes can be resumed with this unstable and potentially fatal backdrop is pure ill-considered and avarice-driven folly. Many Clubs are reportedly teetering on disaster indeed. The answer is a long overdue reform of the game. Sensible caps on player and executive salaries worldwide. Panic-powered circus-like utterly tedious transfer windows scrapped. Reduced ticket prices in tandem with it. The tail has wagged the dog for long enough. A game that was once for the working man, a game that once was about clubs and the badge on your replica shirt primarily, has become all too money-orientated since the advent of the Premier League and that has filtered down the pyramid; the impressionable Championship evidently sees itself as “PL2” such is the regularity it is praised and the money involved, with many clubs selling the proverbial farm in order to put themselves in contention for the utopian desire of Premier League football. Again, the generous remuneration of players is not their fault, more so the broadcasters who have thrown money around like Halloween confectionary and emboldened players’ agents and representatives and their demands. The game was thought to be in rude health in this mercantile era, but I’m fairly sure there’ll be a lot of trouser-soiling in football boardrooms throughout the country - and the desperation to thrust these young men into the bosom of pathogens lethal enough to take the lives of over 30,000 people in just the United Kingdom - rather buttresses that view. The game really is showing it’s backside here and you have to question how it has been allowed to evolve into this unremitting and unfriendly “Frankensteins Monster”

I’m sorry Paul, but it really has bewildered me that running Blackburn Rovers sensibly has been made to look as arduous as sewing in sparring mitts, but that is how it has been presented throughout this near decade long malaise of desperate despair and unease. I just can’t see how the Raos can carry on this sickening pretence any longer. They have proven emphatically over the years that they do not have the wherewithal, the gumption, the vision, the acumen and most critically the contrition and sincerity, to ingratiate themselves with the good upstanding loyal folk who support this club, who have powered and continue to power this club for 144 years. The damage is there for all to see in the form of empty seats. Seats that are a legacy of a severe and unforgivable betrayal of trust. Seats that are now the subtle thief of those long lost feelings of unity and belonging to a club that we hold so dear. Seats that should have been filled with the next generation of enthusiasts. That’s a generation lost and for a club and town our size that is profoundly damaging, present and future. It’s the uncomfortable reality of the situation, but the existing conditions just make the whole club less and less appealing by the day. We all try to contend resolutely with this, perhaps annulling it until the next humiliating derby defeat, the next Ewood no show against newly promoted opposition, the next head-scratching managerial soundbite, the next stand closure, the next sale of a crucial player and so on. But who, in their heart of hearts, can say that they are even merely satisfied with the custodians of our fine club? Everyone of us can accept I’m sure that supporting Rovers will always be accompanied by its share of lows with the highs. Defeats, adversity and even relegation can galvanise a club. But nothing ever changes here; the anguish, the weariness, the bitterness, the helplessness, it never seems to decrease in intensity. Ewood is a totally despondent, forlorn and morose place and that is the owners biggest violation: They’ve removed the hope and the smile from that magnificent edifice on Nuttall St. and worse still shown no remorse in doing so

I haven’t posted about Rovers fortunes for a long while. It’s so hard to believe in the current ownership and it’s very easy to become disaffected and disillusioned with the way in which the poultry barons in Pune have breathed life into our nightmares. However............ On the subject of their 7th permanent manager in 9 abject years, it is hard to escape the fact that any judgement of Tony Mowbray was always going to be distorted by the folly that preceded him. He followed Owen Coyle, who was a farcical appointment that could only have been entertained by fools looking to torment an already mistreated fan base. Therefore the unsuccessful battle against relegation was overlooked and Mowbray’s contribution from Feb-May was, rightly or wrongly, viewed largely as a valiant effort. The promotion season was enjoyable for the simple reason that for the first time under these wretched owners, a winning team was being turned out most weeks and, to Mowbray’s credit, he projected a palpable authenticity and came across as the “proper football man” that so many of us dearly craved. That said, for me personally, the football was unconvincing, but I was (like most of us I suspect) carried away with this euphoria of winning, which had become so alien. Last season again seemed to be considered a “free hit” by many, but for me this is where significant concerns began to manifest themselves on a consistent basis. Chief amongst them, the “marquee” signing Brereton, the porous defence and Mowbray singularly failing to integrate the talented Joe Rothwell until it was too late. This summer was not only a missed opportunity, but for me actually inflicted more weaknesses in a squad that so badly needed augmenting in crucial areas. The goalkeeping situation has completely bemused me. Raya was far from faultless, at times painfully naive, but the necessary promise was there to be nurtured and developed. Walton is not an upgrade and more significantly is not even our player. For me the sale of Raya is symptomatic of this manager, his handling of youth players has left a lot to be desired, as both Nyambe and to a certain extent Travis demonstrate with their performances, which have to me displayed confidence issues and an anxiety which were non existent 9-12 months ago. The acquisition of Gallagher is fast becoming as big an albatross round Mowbray’s neck as Brereton and the striking department is beginning to look worryingly bare. The team, much like the club itself, is drifting in a mode of complacency and that is when sides are at their most vulnerable. A real motivator and tactical innovator is what the club needs and has needed since the needless jettisoning of Allardyce. 9 years have nearly passed, very little fun has been had following Rovers in those times. The Raos have had 7 go’s at getting it right and simply have not, only proving that their heads are as empty as Ewood Park. Mowbray has probably come to the end, but the sad and frank truth is, I have no faith his replacement will be any greater suited to deliver the needs of our football club

GAV, vintageadidas........ Just been t'Cartford. Top drawer. Had the Venison stew special which was flawless (although slightly meagre at £13-odd). Also had a fancy Bread-and-Butter pudding which was quite honestly the finest desert I've ever had. Fairly local to me living in Garstang, would certainly reccomend. Regards Pete