RELEGATION is a killer for everyone at the club, writes Simon Garner.

In the wake of going down the one thing you need is stability, and less than 24 hours after Rovers were relegated from the Championship, Paul Senior left his role as the club’s Director of Football and Operations.

The future of Tony Mowbray also appears unclear and that only adds to the uncertainty.

Behind the scenes in particular you need that stability to help move the club forward.

When Senior was appointed in January he came in to a Championship club, and his kind of role isn’t one that’s usually associated with clubs in League One.

When he was first appointed I thought it was a strange move. I met him at the Birmingham game just a few weeks after that, and although it was early in his time, I didn’t really understand what his role was.

However, you always need someone at a club who can act as a spokesperson, someone who speaks to the owners, and can be accountable to the fans.

He was obviously brought in to recruit players, but found that difficult in January.

He also brought in Mowbray in February and was someone who the head coach will have met with and you just hope that he’s not lost an ally now that Senior has left.

On the field you have got to say that at the end of the day, the season is 46 games long and when you look back, relegation was down to what happened earlier in the campaign.

Rovers did all they could at Brentford and I thought the gameplan worked very well.

At 2-0 up it was looking great and I was thinking ‘here we go, we could be all right’.

When I was looking at the games I thought that Forest would beat Ipswich as they had nothing to play for.

I thought Rovers would find it tough at Brentford, they are a good side, but Rovers performed well.

The result that did surprise me was Bristol City, I thought they would beat Birmingham and so the Blues would go down but it wasn’t to be.

One of the most disappointing things over the past two or three years is how the fans have been let down.

It was a great turnout at Brentford with 1,600 in the away end which is unbelievable in the circumstances, and the fans have always followed the football club.

As long as they know what’s going on at their club then they will follow Rovers home and away.

When I was at Ewood the fans were great, and there was a real sense of togetherness and the players understood the history of the club.

That seems to have been lost over the last few years, now the challenge is to get it back.