Members of the Rovers Trust would like a closer relationship with the club's owners - as this week marks 10 years since their takeover.

But a decade into their reign, Trust chairman John Murray believes unanswered questions centre around what drives Venky’s’ continued ownership of the club, and what their long-term vision is.

Murray says the best chance of a relationship comes through chief executive Steve Waggott who has had a responsibility for the day-to-day running of the club since his appointment in December 2017.

It was after the departures of long-serving pair John Williams and Tom Finn, from their roles as chairman and managing director, that prompted the inception of the Rovers Trust which has been going since 2012.

Current membership now stands at around 650, but was significantly higher during the early years, and chairman Murray says the hope is to develop a relationship with the owners.

“The Trust is not a protest movement. The members, particularly this year and last year, are telling the board that they would prefer a better relationship with the Venky’s after all this time,” he said.

“I’m not sure they’re at the stage where they can forget the grave errors, but certainly looking forward, they want us to have a better relationship with the owners. Getting that is difficult, we can largely only do that through the chief executive.”

It is now some seven years since the owners, as a collective, last attended a match at Ewood Park, and more than two since their last piece of correspondence.

Despite having funded losses which have run into nine figures, the owners have never been open to any outside investment, and also refuted any claims of an intention to sell.

The Rovers Trust, along with other supporters groups, have had the opportunity at the club’s bi-annual consultation meeting to ask questions of chief executive Waggott and finance director Mike Cheston, but what if they had the chance to quiz the owners?

“There are two questions, ‘what are they getting out of it?’ and ‘what’s the forward strategy?’ The first one is the 64million dollar question,” Murray said.

“If the big question is ‘what are they getting out of it?’ the second one is ‘how can we possibly recover from spectators not going to a match for virtually all of this year?’

“It needs focus and marketing.

“If you were to ask Rovers fans where they saw us in five years, they would answer about the team on the pitch, but more to my interest is that it’s our 150th anniversary.

“We ought to be planning for that, and the Trust wants to help on how the club can brand itself as the most successful town club in the world.”

Rovers aren’t alone in having owners who prefer to stay out of public eye, but Murray believes their lack of presence at matches does set them apart, and he questions when they may ever return.

He said: “I’m sure before the protests the Venky’s had the idea that they would be coming to matches regularly.

“I said at the supporters consultation meeting, ‘how are we going to get this rapprochement?’ How we do that is another matter.

“But if you were scratch most Rovers fans I think they would still want the Venky’s to sell.”

Since the departure of Sam Allardyce, just two months into their reign, the owners have employed seven different managers, including three during a tumultuous period between October 2012 and May 2013.

Murray questions life beyond current long-serving manager Tony Mowbray, given the club's recent history of managerial appointments, not least in the summer of 2016 when Neil Warnock was overlooked and  Owen Coyle installed.

“There were some key errors made, and a lot of it smelled, and even up to Owen Coyle they were making mistakes on managers, if you think of where Neil Warnock would have got us,” he said.

However, their financial support has remained unwavering, not least through the coronavirus pandemic.

“Each club needs a funder, and as we see it there are three levels,” Murray continued.

“There’s the pandemic level where things are really bleak for supporters, most of all.

“Then post-pandemic, what are the EFL going to do about FFP where clubs like us will be easily breaking it again? We may not get much of the bail-out money because we are being funded.

“Then there’s the medium-term. If the Venky’s have been here 10 years already, one could suppose that probably in another 10 years they might not be the owners, but we’ve no idea and never had any idea of their thinking about from probably getting back to the stage we were at when we sacked Allardyce and that’s the Premier League.

“But football has changed during that period and the big test will be post-Tony Mowbray, because their record of appointing and promoting managers has not been good.”