A year on from their lowest low, Blackburn Rovers are on their way back
354 days ago Rovers became the first Premier League champions to fall to the third tier - after a breathless year in League One they have won promotion back at the first attempt
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Your support makes all the difference.What ended in celebration, promotion and vindication started in disappointment, anger and uncertainty.
“Whether the journey for me continues or not. Let’s see. If it does, I can only see it being really strong if we can keep the right players." Tony Mowbray is addressing the half a dozen or so journalists gathered in the Griffin Park press room.
"It's going to be a huge summer for us in terms of recruitment, and conversations with the owners are coming - we have to recruit well, be strong next year and bounce back. We need to keep our under-contract players. If we do, we will hopefully be too strong for a lot of clubs in League One. We just need to turn the ship around and get promotion."
Blackburn Rovers had just been relegated to the third tier for the first time in 37 years, the first Premier League champions in history to fall that far. It was the bleakest chapter in an ever-darkening story of one of the Football League's founder members.
That was 354 days ago.
Now they are back. Victory at Doncaster on Tuesday evening confirmed what fans, players and manager alike had toiled so hard for, promotion back to the Championship at the first attempt.
It has been a long journey and not one without its pitfalls.
Losses in the first two league games, the second at home to their opponents on Tuesday, made the pre-season favourites tag look thoroughly misplaced.
Multiple relegations, hapless managers, fan boycotts and supporter protests, court cases, chickens on the pitch and broken promise after broken promise, it would have been easy for a club pushed to its very breaking point over the last eight years since the Venky family arrived to fall apart for good.
But Mowbray didn’t shy away from the challenge and doing what he has always done throughout a blue collar, no nonsense career, he doubled down on his commitment to bringing a fractured group back together. Since defeat at Oldham in mid-October Rovers have only lost once.
"That game changed the way we played,” Mowbray says. “We had to be more positive in this league and stop letting teams that weren't as good or had as good players as us have too much of the ball against us.
"After 12 games we were well behind Wigan and Shrewsbury so in the last 30-odd games we accrued a lot of points. It did take some time to acclimatise to the league and the new players needed time to settle in.
"We stepped higher up the pitch and started scoring a lot of goals and that's given us confidence."
Mowbray hasn’t done it alone, of course. The mercurial Bradley Dack, voted PFA League One Player of the Year, has been a revelation and has driven Rovers on, almost single-handedly at times, toward this goal. At £850,000, he looks the bargain of any season, let alone this one.
Captain Charlie Mulgrew has led from the front throughout, a Champions League veteran, never once shying away from the rough and tumble of League One. It was fitting that a 14th goal of a remarkable season from central defence was the all-important one on Tuesday night.
The list goes on. Richie Smallwood never gave the ball away (as the song goes). Danny Graham ploughed the lone furrow while January additions Adam Armstrong, Jack Payne and Amari’I Bell all helped bear the load since the turn of the year.
A word too for the supporters, a group who have stuck by their team through Steve Kean and Shebby Singh, Owen Coyle and AWOL owners, who have travelled the length and breadth of the country in record numbers to watch them this year. 4,000 were at the Keepmoat to see promotion finally realised. No one deserves this more than them.
It has been a team effort from first to last with Mowbray the constant, the steady hand on the tiller and the man at the heart of this redemption story.
“It’s unfair to say ‘oh well, it’s Blackburn Rovers in League One’ because you cut your cloth accordingly,” he says. “We’re a League One club and this group of players deserve great credit to go on a run like this. They should be lauded for what they have done.”
As he has all along, Mowbray is already looking ahead.
“The Championship will be tough. If Southampton, Stoke and West Bromwich Albion come down from the Premier League, they’re the bottom three at the moment, then their budgets will be £60-£70m and they have Premier League players who have been there for six or seven years.
“These lads have come up from League One – the games will be tough. We have to give ourselves a chance next year and that’s what I will discuss with the owners.
“If we can find this same spirit with the new signings, make sure they are good human beings that galvanise with the current group then we will have a chance.
“I’m pleased for the players, delighted for the fans and hopefully the club is now facing in the right direction, back upwards.”
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