Blackburn face the ghosts of past mistakes against Derby – but perhaps the future is still bright
Blackburn Rovers will face a former manager and several former players when they face Derby County - a team who now represent what Blackburn could have been.
In many ways, Ewood Park will present a familiar scene this Saturday. John Eustace will be the striding around the dugout, Ben Brereton Díaz will be bullying defenders, Danny Batth will be putting himself about at the back, and Lewis Travis would be snapping at ankles if only he hadn’t broken his collar bone. All quite normal for a Blackburn fan, save for one thing – they’ll all be doing it for Derby County.
When Blackburn Rovers host Derby this weekend, they will be playing against the ghosts of their past and of decisions made by the ownership which have drastically altered the makeup of Valérien Ismaël’s side. They will be up against their former manager, who left the club under a cloud in February, and a squad which contains no fewer than five former players. Blackburn will celebrate their 150th birthday on Saturday - perhaps it’s appropriate that their past should be on the pitch as well.
Blackburn’s squad, meanwhile, is much changed from the side which flirted with the play-off places last season, with several players leaving largely due to the financial decisions underpinning the running of the club by Venky’s, their much-maligned owners. But has a summer of change sent Blackburn off in the right direction, or will their opponents present them with a vision of what could have been?
How Derby came to represent Blackburn Rovers’ alternate reality
As the late Jim Bowen, presenter of Bullseye and a lifelong Blackburn fan, might have said: “Have a look at what you could have won.”
Had fate twisted in slightly different directions, perhaps Brereton Díaz would still be scoring freely at Ewood Park or Travis still driving opposing midfielders up the wall and back with his masterly and dastardly grasp of football’s darker arts. Instead, they have both moved on, along with a number of their former colleagues.
Suggesting that fate had much of a hand in their departures would, of course, be disingenuous. They left primarily because Blackburn’s owners decided it was preferable to let them go rather than to meet their contractual demands.
Brereton Díaz, once supposedly the subject of transfer interest which might have earned the club as much as £15m, left on a free transfer in 2023. This summer Batth, forward Andi Weimann, and defender Deon Sanderson all followed suit. Only Travis joined Derby for a transfer fee, reportedly £3m, when his contract was starting to wind down too.
All of those players, save for Sanderson, were regular starters and in the case of Travis and Brereton Díaz, cult heroes for the club’s fans. Most Championship teams would be desperate to keep them, or at least extract maximum value in the transfer market. Blackburn let them slip away.
There are mitigating circumstances in some cases. Brereton Díaz was kept on in the hope that his goals would propel Blackburn to promotion, a prize worth rather more than £15m. Batth and Weimann, although excellent last season, are not the most youthful players.
But there are few excuses for the departure on a free transfer of winger Tyrhys Dolan, still just 23 and a regular starter before he wound up at Espanyol. Blackburn’s decision makers could have tried to sell him before his contract expired to make a profit or they could have found the money to offer him an improved deal. They chose the third option – neither. It’s not an option more successful teams typically select.
In total, 13 players left Ewood Park this summer, five of them for transfer fees, with only Travis and key centre-back Dominic Hyam sold at a price which could be argued to reflect the highest transfer fee they could have drawn had they been sold at the right time. Many of those who left were key parts of the team – Hyam, Travis, Dolan and full-back Callum Brittain in particular. Churn is a fact of life in the Championship, but this was an especially severe talent drain, and one that could have been avoided (or at least made more gradual and profitable) if those in positions of power had approached the transfer market differently.
There were, surely, points in time at which the club could have made more money from John Buckley (sold to Saudi side Al-Kholood for around £1m) and Joe Rankin-Costello (£750,000 to Charlton Athletic). Few clubs sell players at their peak value every single time, but Blackburn have struggled to do it even once or twice since Venky’s took the reins 15 largely painful years ago.
It wasn’t even a profitable summer. With so many players leaving, the transfer fees earned were all spent straight away, with eight players signed for fees and two more on loan. The club broke even in the market, more or less, but the result is a squad which has suddenly replaced proven second-tier talent with unknown quantities.
Few of the new arrivals have Championship experience, and they come from all corners of Europe – one each from GAIS in Sweden, Legia Warsaw in Poland and Moreirense in Portugal, for instance, and two from Belgian outfit KV Kortrijk. Few have been completely convincing in this early stage of their Blackburn career.
Striker Andri Gudjohnsen, son of former Chelsea forward Eidur, has scored three in his last three games, which is promising, while Ryan Alebiosu’s bombing runs down the right flank have made him an instant favourite, but this remains a side filled with question marks. Opposing them this weekend will be a side filled with players who played some of their best football at Ewood Park, led by a manager who had them on track for a play-off place before his sudden and controversial departure - and who now has Derby in the play-off conversation themselves.
Blackburn won’t just be playing against their past, but against a glimpse of an alternate reality in which it was them who took Sunderland’s place in the top six and made it to the top flight – or, perhaps, in which Brereton Díaz was sold for a substantial sum and the funds used to strengthen the team in the long-term and make such dalliances with the upper end of the table a more frequent occurrence.
After churn and change, will Venky’s choices come good by the end of the season?
While Eustace’s decision to leave Blackburn in the midst of a potential promotion run last season left an exceptionally sour taste in the mouth of most of the clubs’ fans, it must also be remembered that his departure reflected on the board’s management of the club, too. Their dubious approach to the transfer market is not the only way in which they have left scars on the side.
While a desire to coach a club nearer to his family – and a club for which he had played, at that – was a factor in Eustace’s deeply unpopular decision, it also appeared at the time as though his interactions with Venky’s played a major role, too.
Reporting from The Lancashire Telegraph (who have since been banned from Ewood Park for “repeated issues with the newspaper’s conduct and reporting” as the club chose to put it) suggested that Eustace was left frustrated after staff members were hired and fired without his knowledge or input, investment that was expected in the squad failed to materialise and the club refused to offer him a new contract. The last issue, certainly, seems to fall in line with the experiences of players like Dolan and Travis.
Just as the board’s choices in the transfer market have left the team with a squad which is yet to receive the jury’s verdict, so the head coach’s suitability for the role is unclear. Eustace’s successor, Ismaël, started so abysmally that the promotion run was torpedoed almost instantly before finishing the season strongly – and now Blackburn have started a new season in dire form only for green shoots to start appearing.
Three games ago, Blackburn were in the relegation zone after crumbling in the second half against Sheffield United. Now, a fortnight later, they are closer in terms of points to the top six than they are to the drop after peeling off three successive wins against Southampton, Leicester City and Bristol City.
The sudden turnaround has generated a surge of quiet optimism and Ismaël’s back three system seems to be coming together, even if his determination to play out from the back with centre-halves not always noted for their technical quality has created some hairy moments.
Right now, it’s hard to know whether a year of drastic change in the dugout and in the dressing room is going to yield positive results, but there are some statistical markers which point in the right direction. Blackburn are sixth in the Championship for total xG, and have the fifth lowest xG allowed. Their league position does not necessarily reflect their performances, even if the fact that they are underperforming both ‘expected’ totals does speak to some shoddy finishing and a nasty habit of conceding soft and sudden goals.
Perhaps all those new faces will settle in and the work done in the transfer market will look rather smarter come the end of the season. Perhaps a visible lack of depth in defence is a problem that won’t be punished. Perhaps the club will make savvy moves in January which put things on the right path where required. But it’s not easy to be confident of that when most decisions made at Blackburn have sent the club further down the league than up it.
Every club’s owner shapes their squad through their choices, but it’s rare that such a stark reminder of the consequences is presented as will be the case when Derby come to town on Saturday. It’s also hard to shake the sensation, given what must surely be seen as persistent mishandling of transfers and behind-the-scenes affairs, that if this story does have a happy ending, then it will be a matter more of luck than of judgement.