AFTER nine months of blood, sweat and tears, Blackburn Rovers will finally bring the curtain down on a traumatic season this weekend.

And if the players have anything about them then they will want to finish the campaign on a high against Birmingham City on Saturday.

For not only do they owe the supporters a top performance for the way they've stuck by them this season, but several players should also have a few points to prove to the manager before he starts drawing up his list of summer transfer targets.

Some have more to worry about than others as Graeme Souness plots a mini shake-up.

Dwight Yorke looks a certainty to leave this summer after dismally failing to live up to the hype which surrounded his arrival from Manchester United.

If he was ever going to do something in a Blackburn shirt then he would have done it by now, but the bottom line is the move has simply not worked out for either him or the club and it's high time he moved on.

It also looks like Andy Todd could be following him out of the door this summer.

The club have already slapped him on the transfer list and I'm sure there'll be no shortage of takers for a player who has performed consistently well in the first team this season.

I don't know the full ins and outs of his dispute with the manager but I can see it from both sides.

If Todd was told he was going to start against Leeds and then turned up at the ground to find he'd been dropped, I can understand why he got so upset.

I'd be disappointed if that happened to me and perhaps he wasn't in the right frame of mind to take a place on the bench.

But, likewise, a manager expects a player to be professional in that situation and if he does have a grievance then two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon is probably not the best time to air it.

Only time will tell if that rift can be healed or not.

In the meantime, Rovers must try and pull out all the stops in their quest to finish the season with a bang.

The whole squad have been under a tremendous amount of pressure during the second half of the season and it must have felt like a huge weight was lifted from their shoulders when they recently beat Manchester United to secure their place in the Premiership.

After going through something like that it then becomes very difficult to motivate players for the last few games of the season when nothing appears to be riding on it.

Of course, the club still have a substantial amount of money to play for as each place in the Premiership is worth around £500,000.

But that doesn't quite have the same edge as fighting against relegation or battling to get into Europe.

Hopefully, personal pride will fire the players up for a grandstand finish. They owe the supporters a performance.