Just when you thought things couldn’t get any bleaker or more farcical at Ewood Park along comes the revelation of the deputy chief executive’s email to the club’s owners in December.
The email paints a picture of a shambles where finances need sorting out and where the lines of management are weak and blurred with Paul Hunt himself feeling a debilitating lack of control.
He also makes a huge plea for Venky’s to start making regular visits to matches and for him to be allowed regular meetings in India with the owners.
And, two days after this newspaper called for manager Steve Kean to go, in his email he too urges the owners to show Kean the door because he had “lost the crowd” and the players “no longer want to play for him”.
The note portrays a club divided, a club heading in the wrong direction fast, a club in utter chaos.
And to all those people outside Lancashire in the media and football world at large who piled criticism on the protesting Rovers faithful, we have one thing to say to them today: read Paul Hunt’s email and apologise to the supporters now. It’s the least you can do.
All of us who live and work in this area are feeling pretty raw after a disastrous event that was entirely preventable.
The owners’ stewardship has been beyond inept.
The decision to get rid of accomplished achievers like Sam Allardyce and the loss of John Williams is all the more bewildering when you consider that the one thing inexperienced football club owners need around them above everything else is, guess what, experience.
As for Steve Kean, yes he has shown resilience in the face of exceptionally strong criticism and no-one likes to see an individual pilloried but his signings have on the whole been poor and he has allowed a situation to develop where some of the older heads, for one reason or another, have been allowed to drift away from the cause. In football terms he has failed.
So where do we go from here?
First and foremost the owners need to admit that they simply are not suited to the task in hand. That means selling the club and, if they want to make some kind of honourable amends, selling it to a responsible buyer who will respect the traditions of the club and then run Rovers utilising sound management principles.
But if they are determined to hang on then Venky’s must act swiftly and jettison Steve Kean now – preferably this week. That is the very least they can do if they want to form any kind of relationship with the supporters in the future. This week is one of the darkest chapters in the history of a proud football club, and many fear that under the present chaos, Rovers run the real risk of a continued slide, perhaps into Division One.
That is an unthinkable prospect, but more important, it’s entirely avoidable.
Rovers do have some good players. The club simply needs strong management in the boardroom and on the touchline.
Venky’s have to act now to put right the myriad wrongs that have been allowed to crystallise in the past 18 months.
If they don’t, more chaos will follow. If they do, Rovers can turn a corner and look optimistically towards getting back where they belong: in the Premiership.
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