I REMEMBER how the Blackburn Rovers team I played in gained in confidence even after an FA Cup defeat to Liverpool in 1991, and I hope the same will happen again. Back then we were so close to beating them at Ewood Park.

Even though we lost the replay, the tie did help to build our belief and we just wanted to kick on from it.

It gave us a taste for it, for playing against the big teams in front of big crowds.

That was what we wanted to do every week and it was a sort of motivation for us.

The club got promoted to the Premier League the season after that, so hopefully that can be repeated.

I think for the current Rovers team, to only lose 1-0 in the replay having drawn away, there are only positives to take from that.

It’s been a great run to get to the quarter finals and the club has supposedly made at least £1m, which is a lot of money to a club like Blackburn.

It shows how important the FA Cup can be to a club like ours.

It was great for the club to have a full house at Ewood Park again, and hopefully some of those extra fans will come back regularly.

Even if it’s only 2,000 or 3,000 of them, it will really help.

You’d like to think that a night like Wednesday will encourage people to return, and if Rovers can win a few games between now and the end of the season that will help with season ticket sales.

It will be extremely hard to make the play-offs now, I think you can pretty much write that off, but you still want to finish as high as you can.

Rovers have a good young side that it is capable of kicking on into next season.

The manager has recruited well and has made the players he has signed into better players, so I think he has done a great job.