Tony Mowbray has made his feelings known about the state of the Ewood Park pitch to chief executive Steve Waggott as the club look to find a resolution to the quality of the playing surface.

Mowbray says his players have moaned about the state of the pitch after recent home games and that it is affecting the way they are looking to play.

The pitch was visibly cutting up in the 1-1 draw against Stoke City in which players were seen to be getting caught in the turf.

Mowbray had touched on the pitch not allowing his side to move the ball quick enough in the Boxing Day draw with Sheffield Wednesday, but went into more depth when asked specifically about the surface following the Potters draw.

He said: “I probably shouldn’t get into that, I don’t want to criticise members of our staff, I know the groundstaff work extraordinarily hard, sometimes when I get in not long after 6am and they are there at the training ground, they’re working extraordinarily hard to prepare the pitches for us.

“I’ve moaned without moaning about the quality of our pitch, the chief executive knows exactly my thoughts and he at this moment he’s trying to source new pitches.

“This pitch hasn’t been changed for 28 years and if we’re going to play a brand of football then we need a football pitch to play on and if we’re going to have a football pitch here then we need to have a pitch at the training ground that marries the pitch here so we can play on this surface and get used to it.

“It’s a huge expense. These decisions come around infrastructure. Are you building around putting the pitches in to give you the chance to play the brand of football that you want or are you going to spend that £3m or £4m on players? There’s the dilemma.

“Do I want the players or do I want some pitches? My view that we want some pitches and we’ll work with these players but I understand football if you don’t win enough matches you lose your job.

“But if we’re doing the right thing for the long-term future of this club we have to have a surface if we’re going to be a team that can control games and dominate and teams with a fear and you can’t play on a pitch where the players constantly moan after the game that they have no confidence in the bobble of the pitch.

“If I’m telling the centre half to wrap it out wide of the full back who has to play it down the line to the striker and he’s so concentrating so much on the first touch because the ball is bobbling at him it’s a really tough thing.

“That last 20 minutes I told them to play in behind, yet I’ve spoken about how I don’t want to go back to the days of League One by playing direct football.

“We might have to tinker with things in the second half of the season but we’ll see how things go.”

Rovers are back in action at Ewood quickly, with Swansea City due to visit on Tuesday.

“I’ve said at the start of the season we’re changing the identity of this team to one that’s a ball domination team that can create chances, get our full backs high, play with three narrow attackers and put lots of balls in the box,” Mowbray said.

“We work the patterns of play that allow us to dominate the ball and overload certain areas of the pitch. It’s a very technical game.

“We’re playing on a pitch that’s not allowing us to do that at home.

“We’re in the middle of winter and the pitch isn’t fine. It’s really, really poor and have the results from a free-flowing scoring team? Maybe.

“So does the team and coach have to find a different way to play? Yeah, I think we’re at that stage.

“We’ve tried to persevere to win matches in a certain way.  I’ve said that to my staff.

“Gallagher was going on so we could turn them around a little bit.

“We got there in the end, we’ll put the point in the bag and move on.”