Mowbray seeks salvation with Blackburn standing on a precipice

Rovers fear for the future under Venky’s regime

They are billing it in Blackburn as the biggest match since the club won the Premier League title on a nerve-shredding day at Anfield in May 1995 – and with good reason. Only no trophy is on the line at Brentford tomorrow and, even if Rovers pull off a last-gasp survival act after all bar 35 days in the Championship bottom three this season, the celebrations are likely to be short-lived.

Dropping into the third tier of English football for the first time in 37 years could deal a calamitous blow to the long-term future of the Lancashire club. But supporters must fear that beating the drop this term might only delay the inevitable as they continue to count the cost of the controversial ownership of Venky’s.

More than £100 million in debt, despite the club’s best players being routinely sold off by their Indian owners, and with attendances plummeting, Blackburn stand on a precipice, their fortunes hinging on Tony Mowbray’s mish-mash of loanees, free transfers and kids pulling off an escape act at Griffin Park and the hope Nottingham Forest or Birmingham City come unstuck against Ipswich Town and Bristol City respectively.

Mowbray was only parachuted in at the end of February on an 18-month contract after Owen Coyle went the way of Sam Allardyce, Steve Kean, Henning Berg, Michael Appleton, Gary Bowyer and Paul Lambert, all victims of a Venky’s seven-year regime which drew another stinging rebuke this week from former striker Chris Sutton, whose partnership with Alan Shearer inspired the club to that title 22 years ago.

In taxing circumstances, Mowbray, the former West Bromwich Albion, Celtic and Middlesbrough manager, has succeeded to some degree in shoring up a defence that has been Blackburn’s Achilles heel this season but the relentless assetstripping of Venky’s is finally catching up with a club who have been on a slippery slope since relegation from the Premier League in 2012. Mowbray has admitted he feels the weight of people’s jobs on his shoulders.

Blackburn have failed to win any of the past seven league matches in which they have scored at least twice, the sale of defenders Grant Hanley and Shane Duffy last summer hitting them hard, and the team’s brittle core has been reflected in the number of late goals they have conceded. An astonishing 16 points have been thrown away in the final 12 minutes of matches this season, and 11 of those dropped in the last four minutes of games. And yet the curious thing is that, since Sept 17, there have been only three games in which Blackburn have been beaten by more than one goal and they also managed to beat newly-promoted Newcastle home and away 1-0.

Despite selling the likes of Hanley, Duffy, Rudy Gestede, Jordan Rhodes, Ben Marshall and

Tom Cairney for around

£30 million in the past two years and defender Derrick Williams, a £250,000 signing from Bristol City last summer, being the only one of 14 arrivals last year that the club paid money for, Blackburn still have the ninth highest wage bill in the Championship. It is why there is likely to be another round of player departures this summer, all the more so if the club drop into League One. But that will hurt less than the many backroom staff who stand to lose their jobs if the club’s worst fears are realised.

May 1995 seems a very long time ago indeed.