For any football fan, the input to your chosen club involves emotion. You don’t mean to do it, but you do. I would love to rise above all the feelings and view every Blackburn Rovers game as a clued-up, detached pundit. And, even from 12,000 miles away, pretend I don’t really care. But I do. At present it’s close season in the Northern summer. I should be free of worry until August. But I’m not. In 2010 the lunatics, in the form of the Venky family, came out of nowhere to create a madhouse that now resides at Ewood Park. Since then it’s been one painful and depressing figurative blow to the head after another for the fans. And just as you thought the crackpot owners could not do anything more bafflingly deranged, they do. They appoint Owen Coyle as manager. At best, underwhelming for the browbeaten supporters. At worst, almost downright provocative. If you take away the emotion, you could ask Rovers fans to give the bloke a chance. So I will. But it’s a big call for all the loyalists back there, given his forever ingrained association with the Claret hillbillies from just the right side of the Yorkshire border. Yes, Burnley. And he has Bolton connections too. Plus dubious links to the carpetbagger influences that installed Steve Kean and started this whole crazy freefall into oblivion. The poor bloke Coyle doesn’t stand a chance. Even if he wins the first 10 games in charge there will be brooding onlookers in the stands waiting to have a gripe. I don’t know who is dafter — him for taking the job or the insane Indians for bringing him aboard. It’s like a bad, twisted dream. From the halcyon days of the Jack Walker regime when we were all in heaven and things could not get any better, to the equally unbelievable Venkys’ rag-tag regime of self-destruction. It’s been a barmy ride. Presently, it’s as if Masterspy and friend Zarin have got together with the cybermen, the daleks, all the Batman baddies and anyone evil in particular to create the Venkys. Mission: to ‘white ant’ the very foundations of Blackburn Rovers Football Club and send it into a bottomless black hole from which it can never return. I have to say the hapless, gormless, ignorant, arrogant, stubborn, deluded, self-indulgent, laughable, out-of-touch, gullible, odious, repugnant, reptilian, pig-headed Indians have done a great job at that. I have run out of words. Maybe John Cooper Clarke can take over. Even Doctor Who, and the incarnation of Matt Smith is actually a Rovers fan, can’t rescue us from here. We are doomed. Over to you Owen. I will try to take the feelings out of the equation and see what you have to offer. Give it a go, but don’t be surprised when the crowd — or what’s left of them down Ewood way — gets loud. And emotional.
thedaverosecolumn 