1st game in the bag

All the waiting, the anticipation is now over the 1st game has come and gone. No points in the bag.

Ok we lost, played pretty poorly and no one really stood out, add to that the very disappointing refereeing performance by Mr 'close' Friend (of Wolverhampton)

No matter of the sound bytes coming out of Ewood saying Rovers will be a top ten side, this seems a long long way away. The once Fortress Ewood saw Rovers put in an abject perfomance allowing Wolves an easy victory. No disrespect to Wolves, but these are the teams we need to be getting full points off at home and a loss is in my opinion a bitter blow. We have the bookies stating Rovers are very low odds to be relegated, with Kean 1 of the favourites to be the 1st manager to get the axe.

Yes there were no Samba, Nelson or Givet today and Nzonzi played alongside Hanley in the middle. You could tell as soon as the squads were announced that we were going to struggle, especially at the back. At times Nzonzi looked comfortable on the ball, passed the ball well and won a few good headers. Although saying that at times his awareness of players around him was poor. Grant Hanley no doubt will be a good player in the future, but was poor today, not closing down Jarvis for the 1st goal proved costly.

Hoilett apart from last 20 minutes looked out of ideas, Dunn and Emerton in centre midfield has got to be 1 of the worse centre midfield pairings in the Premiership. Both booked in the 1st half because they were so far behind play and time after time giave free kicks away needlesly. David Dunn, again in my opinion is not fit enough to be a starter for Rovers, he looks like he's bigger than last season. Emerton, i'm sorry is not good enough, i've no idea what he adds to the team, he huffs and puffs and fails to blow anyone away.

Anyone surprised to see Morten starting today? I was. A lot of people don't like him, but to be honest how many headers did he win to flick on from Robbo's goalkicks for Roberts to stand still and watch the ball go past him? Yes he took a terrible free kick which he blasted way over the bar, but I wouln't have taken him off, that should have been Dunn.

Formica's goals will be very important for us this season, I say this because Roberts spent most of his time arguing with the referee, he is so frustrating to watch. Although he did set up the goal for Formica but I can't remember him doing anything else.

Goodwillie came on and showed his battling qualities and i'm looking forward to him starting very soon. Rochina looks like hes on the David Dunn diet. Roch added some nice touches but struggled to get into a game that passed him by.

We missed Nzonzi in the midfield as we failed to win anything all day. Petrovic who was introduced to Ewood at half time needs to hit the floor running, we need bite in midfield and hopefully he's the 1 to do it.

To sum it all up, our hopes are with the new signings, we need to score goals to stay up and Goodwillie has been bought not as a prospect but a player who can do the business now. He cost us 2.8m compare that to the Wolves strikers Fletcher and Doyle both costing around 6.5m each, just shows how far we are behind teams like Wolves in the striking department and Wolves are a bottom 5 team.

We need structure installed into the side, at times it was like watching schoolkids. We need 2-3 more signings. Where is this big striker? When did Givet become a key player for us? as discussed on the radio coming home. To be fair i'd be happy with loan signings coming in, as long as they are decent. Look at the bench today, ouch............ we are very thin on the ground. This should never have happened, we should have had a settled squad way before this game.

But enough said, i'm still excited for this season and 1 game doesn't send a team down. We need to play smarter and to our strengths. Roll on to the next game, THE START OF OUR SEASON.