‘We will do everything in our powers to support them in our quest to make an instant return to the Premier League’.
Akin to his embryonic days at Blackpool, Appleton quickly turned Rovers into a disciplined and resilient outfit that was difficult to beat. The undoubted high of the Salford man’s brief reign was a deserved 1-0 win at Arsenal in the F.A. Cup.
Ironically, it was defeat in the subsequent quarter-final to Millwall that appears to have proved too much for Blackburn’s capricious owners. League form had dipped markedly – the fluctuations in Rovers’ results might just be the consequence of an unbalanced and moderate current squad as opposed to whoever the boss of the day is – when Appleton’s side withstood a stern test of character to secure a draw against conspicuously combative opponents at the New Den.
Three days later, however, the double whammy of an insipid 1-0 replay defeat, and an attendance figure of 8,635 for that game (the club’s most recent appearance at the same stage in 2007 drew a crowd of 27,743) confirmed Rovers as a club back in peril. The heart of the team was back in evidence last Sunday when they fought to the 95th minute to avoid a first reverse for 34 years against their bitterest of rivals, Burnley. Commitment alone wouldn’t prove enough to save the manager.
Empty seats appear to be a chief concern for Venky’s. Average gates this term are 14,665. During the Premier League season in which the owners made their purchase – 2010/2011 – that figure was 10,343 higher.
Still, Desai and her cohorts refuse to recognise that this awful slump in the fortunes of one of the Football League’s founding member clubs has come on their watch – seemingly content to shift the blame on to the man in the manager’s office.
Sympathy might be in short supply for Appleton, being he is the man who walked away from his previous assignment under 10 weeks after accepting that role – not to mention this blow being softened by a £500,000 pay-off.
Notwithstanding that, the career of one of England’s brightest coaches has been indelibly tarnished by the twin events of his unsatisfactory departure from Blackpool and subsequent 67 days in the employment of a group of people whose collective name is becoming a byword for footballing farce.
The treatment of managers at Ewood Park serves to make these men mere collateral damage in a story few can have foreseen when Venky’s first entered English football consciousness. As a coup de grace to this latest chapter, it was Singh – a man Appleton recently claimed to have had no dealing with – who arrived at the club’s Brockhall Training Complex brandishing the letter which would inform Berg’s replacement of his fate.
In an era in which applications run to the hundreds when a managerial vacancy presents itself, a few fingers might hover warily over keyboards before pushing the send button on C.V.’s destined for whoever will oversee the latest Ewood Park recruitment drive.
Ultimately, self-belief is a core facet in the make-up of any football manager and there will be plenty who are sure they can be the man to pick up the ailing but famous club who won the last of their three English league titles only 18 years ago, and lifted the League Cup as recently as 2002.
Berg illustrated the requisite ego by accepting Rovers’ advances months after saying, ‘there are no real managers with credibility who would accept a job like that’.
The prime wish of Blackburn devotees would be to see a steady hand back on the tiller at the very top of their esteemed club.
If Venky’s remain in situ, the headline requirement for a new manager will surely be the proven ability to lift Rovers back into the Premier League – assuming Championship status is assured this term – before stabilising the club in the heady environment in which they had become a fixture for nine years prior to the calamitous current administration.
In fact, there is just such an individual who in his present post has led a club in the East End of London from the second tier to relative Premier League comfort.
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