Handy Guide to: Blackburn Rovers FC

Hurrah! A new season is almost upon us!

As I perused the season’s fixtures wondering which defeat would represent the final straw for the ever-dwindling band of Clough-before-Club loyalists, I was staggered to note that we are due to play Blackburn Rovers again this season despite their being promotion certs last time out... it’s a funny old game, hey?

Given this incredible circumstance, and at the risk of incurring the furious anger of blueandwhitehalves again, I have once-more scoured tinterwebs to discover more factual facts about this little-known minnow of the otherwise footballing hotbed of the North-West.

Here we are then:

Our opening loss of the 2013/14 campaign has been specially arranged to be against an original founding member of the Derby County Football League©™ as part of its 125th Anniversary Season, and it shall be on your Sky tellybox so we can record the defeat to analyse in great depth as to why the battering was not Nigel Clough’s fault at all.

Rovers’ first manager of the season will be Gary Bowyer. Like our own manager, Bowyer did absolutely nothing in a spell at Nottingham Forest during his playing career but, unlike our own manager, he has a respectable win percentage as a manager, with 46%. His father Ian though was not a Rovers legend and therefore he is judged entirely on merit rather than sentimentality.

Bowyer’s new first team coach is Craig Short, former Rams record signing and defensive rock, who in June left his steady job as head of academy recruitment at Moor Farm to take up his temporary role at Ewood Park. This should, if last season is any yardstick, see him available again in mid-November. Bowyer was previously an academy coach at Derby for six seasons before joining Blackburn’s backroom team in 2004.

As a mind-blowing study in denial and/or irony, Rovers recently announced that their new shirt sponsors will be RFS, a management consultancy business who specialise in “agility, integrity and trust". It’s like Marie Curie FC announcing a sponsorship deal with Marlboro.

Rovers are rumoured to be losing £2m a month on wages, highlighting again (if it needed it!) just how far the beautiful game has divorced itself from the honourable origins of 125 years ago. That’s a whole lot of mechanically-recovered chicken reconstituted as nuggets and the like.

Rovers stumbled across the line last season with 58 points, only four points above relegation, but only three points behind our tally. Their final position was 17th, ours 10th, and they were heavily reliant on Jordan Rhodes (26 of their 55 league goals) for that. Will Rhodes start the season in the halves..? It looks very much like their season depends on it, although they had attempted to strengthen their attack with the signing of DJ Campbell before he did his ankle in their big pre-season glamour tie against Billy Davies’ favourite club, Preston North End.

On the plus-side, rotund pie-eater and physical comedy exponent David Dunn has already signed a contract extension and will be tripping himself up for our amusement again this season.
http://youtu.be/g-7-5KFru4o

Danny Murphy, who so expertly picked us apart last season, has left the club ‘by mutual agreement’ as they look to slash their wage bill. Homophobe Colin Kazim-Richards has also been returned to Galatasaray, where attitudes like his are more readily accepted, although he’ll be back for his appearance before Brighton Magistrates on August 22nd for the gesture he made at The Amex in February.

Paul Hunt, sacked by Blackburn for campaigning for the removal of footballing mastermind Steve Kean, has recently been appointed chief executive of Dirty Leeds United. He’ll be working under well-known football man Salah Nooruddin for GFH Capital, an Islamic investment bank, as the transition of the game from working-class pastime to faceless corporation prozzie continues apace.

Rams reject Barry Bannan (do-doo, do-do-do) is rumoured to be signing for Blackburn for £750k. A convicted drink-driver like Rovers legend Steve Kean, accelerating is the only thing Bannan can do with his right foot with 4 career goals in 122 matches

That’s all the info the superhighwaynets has on the oppo for the curtain-raiser; please contribute any further factual facts below such that we may all be informed