At Ewood Park, there tend to be five seasons in a year: spring, summer, autumn, winter and protest. This weekend, a new campaign commenced as a multitude of supporter groups have joined up under the banner of Blackburn Rovers Coalition.
“Turn off the taps” starts with refusing to spend money in the stadium on matchday and continues with a planned boycott of the Watford home game on 24 January. New year, same old scene at Blackburn Rovers.
The pertinent question, entirely bleak, is whether anyone will notice. Against Millwall, Ewood had its lowest crowd for a Saturday league game in more than four years (and that likely included season-ticket holders who may or may not have been included in the count).
One stand was entirely free of home supporters and the top tier of another stand was closed. Outside the ground, 30 minutes before kick off, it felt hard to believe that a Championship fixture was about to take place.
Blackburn have the third lowest average home crowd in the Championship this season. Add together the ground capacities of the two teams below them – Wrexham and Oxford United – and it’s still more than 6,000 short of Ewood Park’s capacity. Only at Stadium MK, a ground far too big for its football team, will you find more empty seats in English football.
Still, after a week of rain I should be happy to see a full game at all. Twice this season, Championship matches in Blackburn have been abandoned due to the state of the playing surface. The Alum House Brook, running behind the Riverside Stand, provides water table complications, but the infrastructure of the pitch is dated and requires investment that hasn’t been forthcoming.
A fortnight ago, manager Valerien Ismael stressed that he would accept a reduction in the playing budget to improve the club’s pitch. Managers at this level don’t usually have to make these choices. Ismael calls this job the biggest challenge of his career and you can see his point.
Nothing is ever easy at Ewood; that is the wastage. Everything good only seems to exist as the set-up to a punchline at supporters’ expense. Seventh in the Championship in 2023 to 19th in 2024. Seventh last season to who knows where in 2026.
Rovers were victorious on Saturday, some blessed relief after five winless matches. But the grim reality here is that positive news is always accompanied by concern. There were first-team debuts for Matty Litherland and Nathan Dlamini; the former was named as the game’s best player. After the game, Ismael said that he is using academy players because the attitude and performance in training of others has not been good enough.
Protest has returned because Blackburn are in danger of relegation again and because of a wider, greater unease that a club has been trodden into its own muddy pitch. The malaise is long-term and unforgivable. When Venky’s took over in 2010, Rovers had played in 17 of the 19 Premier League seasons and were a point off the top seven. Their only full top-flight season as custodians ended in a pathetic relegation and Blackburn have not been back since.
In 15 years under Venky’s, Rovers have finished in the top six only once. That was in their only third-tier season in the last 45 years. Again, even the successes come laced with resentment. When one recent list ranked all Championship owners, Venky’s were kept off the bottom by Dejphon Chansiri, now no longer at Sheffield Wednesday. If that’s your low bar…
It is the sheer length of tenure that grinds you down. Fifteen years ago to the day from the time of writing, then new owners appointed Steve Kean as manager – sacking Sam Allardyce – and the rot set in. From then, the only movement was sideways or backwards. Ewood Park, home for 135 years, is full of memories and trinkets that have become ghosts of a time when people were proud to come here.
And so apathy drowns the place like the rain. The first chant of the game from home supporters – “We want Venky’s out” – barely garners support away from one corner of the Ronnie Clayton Blackburn End. “Stand up if you hate the Venky’s” doesn’t get much either.
In the final 20 minutes a banner is raised: “We want Pasha out” (Suhail Pasha is the chief operating officer). But the only people who really seem bothered are two stewards in bright orange jackets who have a word and then leave them to it.
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I – and we all should – wish the Blackburn Rovers Coalition well. Their mandate is everything that is no more, tangible and intangible: investment, ambition, hope. There is no reason why Rovers should be so helpless and so hopeless, ceilings lowered and green shoots damaged by rain. That is not entitlement; look what these owners inherited.
But that’s the biggest problem here. It has been 15 years. When you support a club where nothing ever seems to happen, forcing change becomes only more daunting because you first need to persuade everybody that it is even possible.
You’re asking people to believe in better when nobody can really remember what unadulterated happiness feels like when it comes to Blackburn Rovers. Anger gets into your head and can be used as fuel. Apathy seeps into your bones and breaks your fighting spirit from the inside out.
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