Will you Still need me,
Will you still feed me
When We Lose 6-4.

Big Sam probably didn’t sing this to Mrs Alllardyce when he arrived home from Birmingham late last Wednesday evening and I’m sure he still got his supper.

When I pleaded last week for Rovers to shine for the BBC cameras and serve up a “feast of football”, I didn’t expect them to indulge in a full scale glutton-fest, although since we were at The Villa I suppose a Roman-style orgy was quite appropriate.

I couldn’t remember Blackburn Rovers ever being part of a 6-4 scoreline before.

For the record, there have been two previous such results involving Rovers.

We lost 6-4 to Bristol City on October 29 1955 and beat Bradford Park Avenue by that same score on January 23 1939.

Like Sam, I’m convinced that if the referee had disallowed Warnock’s goal, as he should have last Wednesday, we’d have been telling our ma we wouldn’t be home for tea.

That’s a shame because a final appearance would have added some froth to a season of relatively flat beer.

Talking of beer, the disappointment of losing to Villa capped a rather upsettling week in the Myles household.

That’s because my usual pre- and post-match watering hole has (at least temporarily) closed its doors.

The landlord evidently decided that attempting to run his little village pub profitably was a task akin to trying to keep Portsmouth afloat.

Good luck Keith and Ann and thanks for the memories.

We will of course regroup in another excellent hostelry for the Wigan game and I hope our team will also be able to put behind them the disappointment of being so near and yet so far.

A victory tomorrow would give us some valuable breathing space above the real strugglers, many of whom have played less games than us.

At this stage any side down there would rather have points in the bag than games in hand.

There were many plus points to take from that brave defeat at Villa, and not just the fact that the game had more moments of drama than an entire season of Eastenders.

Commentator Jonathan Pearce banged on about our ageing squad so it was especially pleasing that two of our younger players, Niko Kalinic and Martin Olsson proved to be our standout performers, and I hope both will be rewarded with a start against Wigan.

If we can reproduce the football we played in the first 30 minutes at Villa Park tomorrow night and keep 11 players on the park we might just hit Wigan for the proverbial if not the literal six.

But do you know what? I’d settle for a boring 1-0.