Will Blackburn Rovers really appoint Wayne Rooney? Anything can happen under this ownership

At this point in time, Blackburn Rovers fans are pretty used to expecting the unexpected, and deeply attuned to the absurd. Even for a club which pivots between the sublime and ridiculous as often as this, however, appointing Wayne Rooney as head coach would be something special.

That’s what TalkSport claim could happen, with the powers that be at Blackburn reportedly getting jitters about the sharpness with which the team’s form has nosedived since the appointment of Valérien Ismaël back in February. Out of the frying pan and headlong into the fire, anyone? It’s not as though the owners don’t have some previous…

Could Blackburn Rovers sack Valérien Ismaël already?

To start with the self-evident – since John Eustace’s sudden departure a little over two months ago, everything has gone south at alarming speed for Blackburn. Wins have become defeats, and a healthy chance at a play-off place has become a vanishingly thin one.

Since former Barnsley, West Brom and Watford manager Ismaël was handed the reins, the club have won just one of eight matches, that courtesy of a rearguard action away to Luton Town which was either doughty or downright lucky, depending on how charitable you wish to be – and charity is in understandably limited supply at Ewood Park right now.

Before he bolted for the exit, Eustace did a remarkable job of taking a squad which barely avoided relegation last season and into which little investment was poured and moulding them into a tough-as-teak play-off team, a side which was limited but knew where its limits were and played to them accordingly.

In theory, one could see why the appointment of Ismaël made a certain amount of sense. The way he marshalled his Barnsley side, which reached the play-offs against all odds back in 2021, was not dissimilar to the counter-attacking style instituted successfully by Eustace, and it would seem logical enough to assume that he could slot right in.

Instead, he has ripped up a successful strategy and tried to turn Blackburn, a team with few genuine technicians in their ranks, into a passing side who prize possession. The result has been a side which is suddenly softer at the back and largely aimless up front, and they have slid down the table accordingly. With four matches left, Rovers are now seven points and four places off the top six. It doesn’t take an expert mathematician to appreciate that their odds of going up are rather thin.

Given how poorly things have gone, it would be understandable if the owners – or more accurately their proxies, CEO Steve Waggott, COO Suhail Pasha and Head of Football Operations Rudy Gestede – were getting cold feet about Ismaël’s chances of leading the team to any sort of success going forward. But really… Wayne Rooney?

Without having been in the dressing room at any of Rooney’s three sides so far, it’s hard to imagine that he’s an especially good coach. Whatever stardust he still had from his illustrious playing career didn’t last very long in management, and after a dreadful stint as Plymouth Argyle coach it would be a bold board that went near him in the Championship. But then, in their own way, Blackburn’s decision makers are certainly bold.

It was ‘bold’ to appoint Ismaël when he seemingly wanted to tear up Eustace’s blueprint. It was bold to offer Ismaël a three-and-a-half year deal when he had a track record of failure after leaving Barnsley, and had never lasted a full year in a job. It was bold to fire the head of one of the EFL’s most successful academies without telling the manager, as they did with Eustace, and bold to chide supporters for criticising the amount the club had invested in the winter transfer market.

Perhaps it was even bold to address growing fan discontent and protests over Venky’s long-distance ownership of the club by recording a bizarre half-hour video featuring Waggott, Pasha and Gestede lined up behind a table defending their track record as Blackburn’s stewards, a stilted exercise in self-preservation and bad public relations which combined elements of Lord Sugar and his lieutenants lecturing potential Apprentices with the vibe of captives being forced to read out a statement in a hostage situation.

So Blackburn’s board, for all their many and various faults, do not lack a certain misdirected gumption. But would appointing Rooney really solve anything at all?

Wayne Rooney won’t be the next Blackburn manager – but no coach can fix this mess

The good news for any Rovers fans concerned about Rooney’s lack of any meaningful success in his managerial career to date is that at least one reporter rather closer to the club doesn’t think that it’s remotely likely that TalkSport are correct.

The Lancashire Telegraph’s Elliott Jackson says that the notion that Blackburn are thinking of replacing Ismaël is “far from the situation” and that there has been “no consideration to make a change”.

Instead, the club view Ismaël as a long-term investment and intend to sculpt the squad to his preferred playing style. That’s a positive take in some ways, in that it seems to preclude the likelihood of further managerial chaos, but hardly likely to provide a warm glow to disgruntled Rovers fans.

After all, Ismaël has been a disastrous appointment thus far, and the door has been all but closed on any chance of the play-off spot which had seemed well within their grasp. It would be hard to find a fan with much faith that Ismaël’s rein will be fruitful, and just as challenging to find a fan who wanted it to be long.

But then, if they did sack Ismaël, before or after the season, it wouldn’t change the fact that the fundamental issues run much deeper than the manager. They lie with owners who invest the bare minimum while embroiled in a seemingly endless court case in Delhi, and who haven’t been seen at the club for a decade but refuse to sell. They lie with a board who consistently hire and fire backroom staff members at bewildering speed, with no evidence of a coherent long-term strategy for recruitment or technical direction.

They lie with a board who promise transfer spending to manager and fan alike, keep the chequebook closed, and then attempt to gaslight supporters into believing that a “significant investment” had been made. Or who try to claim that it was “miraculous” that Blackburn were in touch with the play-off places amid a run of five consecutive defeats under the coach they had just appointed, which had seen them tumble out of them.

Ultimately, Eustace followed his predecessor Jon Dahl Tomasson in forcing his way out of the club because he lost patience with a board that over-promised, under-delivered and botched their communication along the way. Until they learn how to do their jobs properly, it’s that same board that hold Blackburn back far more effectively than Ismaël or Rooney ever could.

Still, the idea of appointing Rooney would appear, on the surface, to be madness. His track record does not suggest that a glittering playing career has translated into an ability to coach and manage other players. At least Ismaël succeeded at Barnsley, and at LASK before that. Rooney has rather less to hang his hat on.

It probably won’t happen, anyway. Probably. Then again, this is a club at which the alarming and the unexpected seem to happen with depressing regularity…