It seems that Jason Roberts has still not bought that Jimmy Greaves finishing manual I urged on him last Christmas.

If he had we’d surely be celebrating three consecutive Premier League wins rather than being quietly satisfied that our usual drubbing at West Ham was at least avoided.

This brought the hugely satisfying bonus of wiping the smiles off the faces of Gold, Sullivan and Brady, who I hope will be blowing fortunes rather than bubbles in their latest football acquisition.

Reputedly putting Benni McCarthy on £50,000 a week seems a good place to start.

I’m satisfied that we haven’t shifted out two of our strikers – as there were rumours linking Roberts with a move away from Ewood.

If we had – and with no replacements – we’d have seen a repeat of last season with Chris Samba being used in his emergency role once again.

Four more wins from our 16 remaining games would get us to the supposedly safe 40 points target and we shouldn’t have any real difficulty achieving that as a minimum.

It’s telling, however, that apart from our home win against Aston Villa, we’ve not beaten any team ahead of us in our current 10th position. The gap in class appears to be widening, but at least we can lay claim to being one of the best of the rest!

One table that we still lead in is the the one for the team that has committed most fouls. Up to last Saturday’s games, we led the way with 340 ahead of Sunderland Hull and Aston Villa trailing in our wake. Someone said to me the other week he thought we’d “gone soft”.

This statistic would suggest otherwise, although I suspect many of the fouls have been down to some of our players being too slow rather than malicious.

Rovers 3 Manchester United 0. How about that for a scoreline? Many congratulations to our youth team who pasted the Red Devils in the fifth round of the FA Youth Cup last week. Let’s hope they can go all the way to the final and that some of these young talents will make it through to the first team.

If they do I hope they won’t think of adopting McCarthy as a role model. In many ways, his departure and the manner of it echoed what’s gone on with Robinho at Manchester City. They are players with undoubted talent but with an attitude that stinks.

McCarthy’s new manager Zola cried over Eidur Gudjohnsen’s treachery in signing for Spurs after shaking hands on an agreement to join the Hammers, but is prepared to welcome a player who effectively went on strike to get his way. I’d call that inconsistent management.

If Benni ever does return to Ewood with his new club he’ll be about as welcome as John Terry at a Bridge party.