IN PICTURES: Key topics from fans Q&A with Blackburn Rovers bosses

Organised by the Blackburn Rovers Football and Community Action Group, and hosted by BBC Radio Lancashire’s Andy Bayes, issues from the club’s past, present and future were addressed.

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Here we look at back at some of the key topics.

START TO THE SEASON

ROVERS will resume their Championship campaign on Saturday at MK Dons where they will look to extend their unbeaten run to five matches. But, despite their reversal in results, they remain three points off the bottom three.

Bowyer said: “We certainly wanted a lot more points than what we’ve got, I think our players have deserved a lot more points than what we’ve got, and I think we’ve been on the wrong side of some decisions that could have been prevented with technology.”

Myers confirmed that Rovers’ Indian-based owners Venky’s watch every game, through a live feed, and they have ‘seen for themselves’ that ‘we have a team that are really putting it in for the manager and the club’.

Asked for his hopes for the rest of the season, Bowyer said: “There is an unbelievable amount of teams who can get promoted, it’s that competitive, and I have to say, on the performances our lads are showing, and the experience we’ve gained from the last couple of years, we’re going to be competitive and have a right good go at it. There’s nothing to stop them in my opinion from having a right good season.”

RUDY GESTEDE

IT was put to the panel the club should not have sold last season’s top-scorer Rudy Gestede and that the amount they received from Aston Villa for him – a flat £6m fee – was not enough.

Shaw said: “He was possibly worth more than that but the best offer we got was £4m – and the opening offer from Villa was £5m. And Rudy wanted to go. He came up to the offices on two or three occasions and he wanted to go the Premier League. It would have been very difficult to keep him.”

Shaw also denied that Middlesbrough offered £14m for Gestede’s strike-partner Jordan Rhodes in the summer, adding: “We were offered a good sum but a lot of it was add-ons for promotions and games.”

ALAN MYERS

ASKED about his role, Myers said: “When I came into this club it was a difficult situation. It was forever in the media, the wrong things were being said in the media, and it’s a very fragile club in that respect. So you’ve got two choices, you can either come out every day and talk about everything all the time, and for the want of a better term, wash your dirty linen in public, which I think you’d all agree has been done too much at this club, or you quietly get on with the job and do what you need to do.

“We meet with the Fans Forum on a regular basis, we meet with the Action Group on a regular basis, I’ve never not answered a fan who has written to me or spoken to me. There is different ways to communicate. We put a statement out last summer as one of the first things I was asked to do was get the owners to apologise for what had happened. They did that with that statement and I think a lot of fans appreciated that. Communication is not about talking all the time, it’s about making sure the fans know. We had a situation with Jordan Rhodes, not this summer but last summer, and we could have been out every day talking about things, but as soon as we had the situation clarified, we did come out and make a statement.

“It would be easy for me to come out and speak everyday but it’s about what you say and this club in my opinion needed some stability, some quiet and a little bit of dignity again. Because before I came here, before the last few years, I was always quite jealous with the way the club was run. I thought it was always dignified, always said the right things, without saying too much. Now I just feel that’s the best way to be at the moment.”

THE PAST

SHAW was put on the spot about his role in the signings of expensive flops Leon Best and Dickson Etuhu. He admitted he had signed off on the deals, just days after his arrival at the club, even though he knew they were ‘ludicrous’, but said he did so on the instruction of the club’s then global advisor Shebby Singh, who was acting on behalf of Venky’s.

Asked whether he felt he should still be in the a job after a high court judge threw out Rovers’ attempts to avoid paying the full two-and-a-half years of former manager Henning Berg’s contract, which cost the club £2.25m, Shaw, who was described in court as ‘out of control’, said: “I’m quite puzzled where that came from as I think if the owners had that thought the very next day I wouldn’t have been here as the owners can move on anybody they like.”

Shaw confirmed that agent Jerome Anderson had ‘absolutely no association’ with the club and that Singh, who has not been seen at Ewood Park since Bowyer’s appointment as permanent boss, was no longer involved, ‘not to my knowledge, no’.

The evening ended two questions before the end after a supporter was ejected for swearing.

Earlier on Bowyer had won a round of applause after saying: “We’ve just got to stick together. Everybody in this room, everybody in the stands and everybody at the training ground – and move forward. Stop looking behind and stop worrying about what’s gone on. And if it’s not good enough, we can turn around and look at ourselves in the mirror and say we’ve given it our best shot. Stop the bickering, stop looking behind, and let’s move forward.”

VENKY’S

THE panel were asked what Rovers’ owners are getting out of the club.

Bowyer said: “I’ve been here 10 or 11 years and I understand people’s frustrations; I get that. I try to look at the glass half full and I think everybody has got to learn from experiences. Mistakes were made, nobody is denying that, the owners are not hiding from that, in terms of contracts and terms of employment.

"But what I would say is we have to be careful as a club what you wish for sometimes. They are putting a lot of money into the club to keep the club running properly.”

Myers said: “It’s a real, real shame what happened to this football club but what I see every day is people here who want to get it back to where it was. I see a club that now that is starting to become stable. But stability alone is no good. We can’t stand still, we have to move on. But that takes time.

"You can’t go through what this club has gone through and for it to be an easy fix. It’s hard every day. You look at certain owners who want to change the name of the club, they want to change the colour of the club’s shirt; these owners don’t do that. They’ve made mistakes, I’ll say that openly and they’ll admit that themselves. And people have made mistakes for them. But I can see now a club that is doing the right things.”

Shaw said that two of Venky’s senior representatives visited the club three weeks ago and that, like Myers and Bowyer, he speaks regularly with the owners, although ‘not as much as we have done’ recently.

Venky’s are also ‘keen on bringing Academy players through’, said Shaw, who added, ‘we’ve signed one Academy player last week and we’re on the verge of signing two more’.

BEST TEAM

BOWYER was asked whether he knew his best team. He responded: “In an ideal world you’d love to pick the same XI every week but then you have to take into consideration the toughness of the Championship, form and obviously injuries. I thought Hope Akpan came in for the last two games and was terrific for us. But Danny Guthrie before that was starting to show the Premiership quality he has.

“Injuries are an absolute nightmare, and suspensions, but it’s part and parcel of the game. You also have to take into consideration when people are carrying injuries and are playing through things. Some of our lads are unbelievable; we have to take them out because they are that committed to the club now they will play with injuries. But you and your medical team and support team know with the experience and data that is available to you that you’re risking them being out for eight or 10 weeks at a time. So those decisions have to be made. It’s part and parcel of a manager’s role.”

ATTENDANCES

ROVERS have averaged league crowds of 13,515 this season, 9.3 per cent down on last season, and around 9,000 supporters down on the club’s last campaign in the Premier League.

Asked what the club was doing about falling attendances, Myers said he had tried to engage with supporters with the creation of the FanZone outside the ground, initiatives like the golden season ticket, and the fact that the club regularly speak with fan groups. He also insisted the club is contacting local businesses and supporters with a database history of buying tickets who no longer do so.

He believes Rovers can’t be any more ‘attractive from a commercial point of view; we really can’t, otherwise you start devaluing the club’, but admitted to being worried by statistics that show ‘three per cent of our fan base are under eight’. He also added that ’53 per cent are over 50’.

BURNLEY TICKET PRICES

MYERS defended the club’s decision to charge up to £39 for an adult ticket for next Saturday’s Sky-live East Lancashire derby, saying: “When it comes to prices, and every club does it, not just Blackburn Rovers, we’ve got to look at the games when the demand is high and we have to take a commercial shout on that. What I think is important to say is that for 10,000 season ticket holders will get one of the best prices in the league. We have to get out of FFP and to do that you need to make revenue and it’s difficult.”