7-0 LOSS... AND A TONY AWARD

FEW bosses have been nominated for a managerof-the-month award after a 7-0 home thumping.

Amazingly, that club record defeat against Fulham – far from derailing Tony Mowbray’s young Blackburn Rovers side – has galvanised them with three wins and a draw seeing out last month, hence his nomination for the November award.

Mowbray, 58, took charge of Rovers in February 2017, with the club in crisis under the Venky’s owners.

But his huge experience of managing Celtic, Middlesbrough and Coventry imbued him with a calm, unflustered, seenit-all attitude – vital attributes for working with a struggling club.

He could not save Rovers from dropping out of the Championship but, for once, common sense prevailed and the North Easterner was kept on.

“I told them where I come from, Middlesbrough, if someone punches you in the face, you fight back.” said Mowbray (above).

Now he needs the Venky’s, who have largely been absent from Ewood Park over the past years, to come to the fore.

Mowbray hopes they reject any January offers for leading scorer and new Chile cult hero Ben Brereton-Diaz and then match his ambition by investing in a few signings next month to augment a side often comprising five or six academy products.

“Any one season in the Premier League changes your future forever if you do it properly. Can the owners feel it, can they touch it, is it there? For a few years that hasn’t been the case,” he admitted.

“It’s about a bit of ambition as they showed when they bought Ben Brereton, we bought Sam Gallagher, Adam Armstrong. The fruits are there to be seen now.”

He has also got forward Bradley Dack coming back after a serious knee injury.

“You can’t keep producing results just with academy players,” he said.

“This is now a good time to invest.”