As the battle for the top six hots up, Tony Mowbray isn’t setting any points targets, instead focusing on the continual improvement of his side.

Rovers look well placed to move beyond the 60 points they managed last season, and will have eyes on topping the 70 point mark that Mowbray mentioned at the start of the campaign.

Sitting four points off the play-off spots, with 33 more available, Mowbray isn’t looking too far ahead, other than preparing his team to be in the best position to collect as many of those as possible.

Their third game in a week sees them host a Swansea City side who will also have eyes on breaking in to the top six, with Rovers starting the day one place and one point better off.

Rovers couldn’t make the most of the midweek results that went their way, held to a 0-0 draw at home to Swansea City on Wednesday, but Mowbray’s focus remains on his side.

He explained: “I sat watching the Champions League on Tuesday night, you can’t affect these other games, we can only affect ourselves, so don’t worry too much about what everyone else does.

“Ultimately what happened in midweek was a lot of teams at the bottom won, the teams just above us lost, and the anticipation was there of what an advantage it would be if we won, yet we drew.

“Let’s not worry too much about what everyone else does, if we can win football matches then we’ll give ourselves a chance and an opportunity.

“As I’ve said all season, our aim is to improve and continually improve, get better.

“We have to get better than 60 points if we can and keep moving forward and keep progressing the team and wherever that takes us, if we get in the mid-70s then you’d hope it would be the play-offs.

“If it takes you to mid-60s you’re probably just going to miss out on the play-offs. Let’s see where the points total takes us.

“We have 11 games to go, 33 points to play for, let’s see how many we can get.”

Rovers have eight points from their last four matches, and have lost just once in 11 Ewood matches.

But Mowbray isn’t looking too much in to the form books but happy with how his players are responding to what’s been asked of them.

He added: “You take each game as it comes, I don’t sit here thinking about being proud of our form, we just try and win the next game and prepare the team to play the next game.

“You can judge any run of form off two games or 22 games and tell me we’re doing well or rubbish. The reality of it is to prepare for the next game and I think as long as the team are working hard and trying to implicate what you’re trying to do then we’re happy enough.”