After appearing to arrest a decline brought about by shambolic management at board level, Blackburn boss Gary Bowyer has now presided over a poor start to the season while still under a transfer embargo.

It's been a torturous few years for the loyal supporters of Blackburn Rovers, seeing their team descend from a secure mid-table Premier League position into the second tier with plenty of farce and humiliation along the way. Although that decline down the leagues had appeared to have been halted, a continuing transfer embargo and winless start to this season suggests it may not have abated quite yet.

Theirs is a tale we tell all too frequently in these opposition profiles. In the UK we're happy to list and protect vile 1970s concrete wildernesses with rising damp from demolition and modernisation because it's an example of Brutalist architecture, but football clubs that have played a vital role in the history and fabric of their towns and cities for a century or more are allowed to fall into the hands of reckless foreign owners who set about destroying them through their own incompetence or malice. If Blackburn Rovers was some old theatre somewhere, there'd be an outcry over what's gone on here.

The Venky's — the Indian chicken farmers who bought Blackburn for £23m plus £20m of its debt in 2010 — are the villains/comedians of this particular story. Blackburn was a well-run club when they arrived. That level of debt was not out of the ordinary or that problematic for a Premier League team - Bolton just down the road had getting on for ten times as much red ink on their balance sheet - and with Sam Allardyce in charge the club was secure in the top division. Rovers had a handy habit of buying low and selling high — Chris Samba, David Bentley, Roque Santa Cruz — but as additional funding was reliant on a trust set up by legendary, league-winning former chairman Jack Walker after his death there was a feeling that one of these wonderful foreign buyers was required to take the club on.

Blackburn could scarcely have picked a worse bunch.

The Venky's arrived talking about Champions League football and attempts to sign Ronaldinho. They were advised by agent Jerome Anderson and quickly sacked Allardyce, replacing him with his assistant Steve Kean — one of Anderson's clients — who'd never managed before and quickly showed why. With Anderson advising the board, and representing the manager, it was little surprise to see several of the toads from his log arrive on the playing staff as well. They even signed the agent's son.

Myles Anderson, 20 when he arrived, was described as a late bloomer by Kean having previously managed just a single, solitary substitute appearance for a struggling Aberdeen side in the Scottish Premier League. Having failed to turn out at all for Blackburn he subsequently made five sub appearances for Aldershot and one for Exeter in short term spells before disappearing into the lower Italian leagues. A late bloomer indeed.

They were relegated to a backdrop of increasingly virulent protests from the supporters. Too bloody right as well. What other recourse did the paying customers have against their club being pushed off down the river with Captain Catastrophe in charge with nobody in authority doing anything about it other than to make a lot of loud complaints at the succession of home defeats? For this they were — usually by Sky commentators it should be said — accused of harming their own club's chances of staying in the precious Premier League by creating a negative atmosphere at home games. That's right lads, definitely the Blackburn supporters at fault here - the whole thing would have turned out ok if they hadn't turned up and thrown chickens on the pitch.

The attempt to bounce back out of the Championship at the first attempt was, amazingly, almost even more cack-handed than what had gone before. The Venky's attempted to take a backwards step, with the mood increasingly aggressive towards their attendance at matches, and decided to put Shebby Singh in charge under a "global adviser" title of his own design. Singh, a Malaysian, had a playing career in his homeland but was better known for his work as a television "expert" in the Far East where he would make weird and wonderful, but nonetheless forthright, assessments of stuff he knew nothing about. He should have come to work at LFW.

His year at Ewood Park saw them finish seventeenth in the Championship, work their way through £40m and therefore break the division's Financial Fair Play rules, and fire three managers. Kean was first to go, replaced by Henning Berg who'd won the Premier League as a centre half at Ewood Park in 1995. He lasted 57 days, and one win from ten matches. The club tried to renege on the contract they'd given the Norwegian, saying that the club's own CEO Derek Shaw was a maverick, working independently of the club and without authority while Singh was stuck in Malaysia because of Visa problems, when he agreed the settlement for the dismissal. The High Court dismissed this laughable idea and ordered a payment of £2.25m to Berg which, at just shy of £40,000 a day, made him one of — if not the — best paid player or manager ever in British football.

He was replaced by Michael Appleton, which was something of a surprise given that he'd only been appointed Blackpool manager 12 games prior to that on November 7. He was Blackpool's shortest managerial reign ever when he left on January 11 but, as it turned out, didn't last a great deal longer than Berg at Blackburn — 67 days, 15 matches. When Singh flew in for the week to fire Appleton it was the first time the pair had met.

The League Manager's Association at the time pointed the finger at the Football League, saying it had a duty under its constitution to ensure the professional conduct of its clubs. You need look no further than the arrival, and continued presence, of The Venky's at Blackburn Rovers to see just how little the Football League, Premier League, or FA give a toss about such minor details as who's owning its clubs and how they are running them.

Singh himself left at the end of the season by which time the club had taken the altogether more sensible idea of giving long-serving clubman Gary Bowyer the managerial job. He has set about restoring pride in the club he played for before managing its youth and reserve teams over a decade. But the legacy of what went before remains — by the end of 2013 the club's debt had increased to £54.5m and it was supporting a playing staff of 53 players with a wage bill at 136% of its turnover.

Rovers, like Nottingham Forest, have been under a transfer embargo for this profligacy. QPR broke the rules to a greater extent, but won promotion doing it, moving out of the Football League's jurisdiction in the process and therefore are now able to negotiate the level of their fine while still signing players.

Blackburn have a state of the art training ground and category one academy, but they're starting to suffer a steady talent drain necessary to bring in enough money, and reduce wages to such a level, that the embargo is lifted. Prized asset Jordan Rhodes has been retained — a £12m price tag too much for the Premier League's bottom half, his lack of experience a problem for the top half, and the club unwilling to sell him to a Championship rival. But Rudy Gestede was sold, cheaply, to Aston Villa, Josh King joined Bournemouth on a free and Tom Cairney, all boyband hair and eye for a pass or long range goal, has joined Fulham.

Having initially seemed to have arrested the decline, and started to push the team back towards the play-off picture, Bowyer has now presided over a winless start of three draws and four defeats during which they've failed to score more than once in any match — although only incompetent refereeing at Fulham on Sunday stopped them registering a second goal and 2-2 draw after a greatly improved second half showing.

A press story reporting his sacking, which turned out to be false, has already done the rounds once this season but there are murmurings. The Blackburn fans we spoke to this week bemoaned negative tactics — a Paul Hart-style two defensive central midfielder set up at home in particular — and uttered that dreadful phrase the Charlton Athletic fans used to use when Alan Curbishley had them tenth in the Premier League: "taken us as far as he can".

Although they maintain there is enough quality remaining at Blackburn to be doing better than this — as QPR may find out to their cost tomorrow night — in Bowyer's case it seems rather like blaming the taxi driver for the lack of further progress being made by a cab with no wheels.

Links >>> Official Website >>> Lancashire Telegraph — local paper >>> Blackburn Supporters Message Board >>> Blackburn Mad Forum >>> Vital Blackburn >>> Wild Rover Blog

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TacticalR added 11:40 - Sep 16 Thanks for your oppo profile. That's a good point about the English being very selective about what they preserve. At the time of these events a lot of people seemed to enjoy Blackburn's misfortune, but in retrospect it's hard to escape the conclusion that this could happen to any club. Bowyer seems like an island of normality in a sea of madness. He'll have to go.
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