The team which cannot stop drawing lately travels to the side with the most remarkable record out of the ninety two this season tomorrow. In fact, I would argue that Blackburn Rovers have the most remarkable record of this and any other season in recent memory.
Despite their current position of third in the table, Blackburn have lost more games than City have this season – in fact, only Huddersfield and Wigan have lost more than them. However, because the Lancashire team can back up their twelve losses with thirteen wins, they find themselves right in the running for a Play Off spot. Normally, you’d expect a side that had one more win than defeat to be somewhere around tenth in the table at this time in the season.
Given the complete absence of draws in Blackburn’s league season so far, it should mean that City will need to score to avoid defeat and, based on our last two games in particular, that’s going to be a problem – even if it looks like we’ll have more attacking options to choose from than we did on Thursday.
New Year or not though, the seven decades quiz continues, here’s the latest one with the answers to be posted on here on Monday.
60s. Born in Sunderland, this defender’s first team was a little to the south and is named after an agricultural fertiliser. His performances soon attracted the attention of Football League clubs and it was Blackburn who got his signature. He was a pretty regular opponent for City during his seven years at Ewood Park and only tasted defeat once in those encounters – he also came on as a sub in the first ever City game my brother went to!
The rest of his Football League career was spent in Lancashire, first with a team which might be called outsiders given the name of their ground and then for a town that once had an instantly recognisable, but now disgraced, MP. Upon leaving this club, he dropped back into non league football, moved closer to home and started playing at a running track. Who is he?
70s. As with the first question, this north easterner by birth never played professionally in that part of the country. Blackburn was his first club and he played more games for them than any of the six teams he subsequently turned out for during a career that lasted thirteen years. He got into the Blackburn side following the sale of the player he was understudying to a First Division team. Three of his one hundred and four league appearances for the Ewood Park club were against City, but a single draw was the best he managed against us. The eighties saw him move on to play in front of the Cuckoo Lane end terrace for a while and there were loan spells to Yorkshire with a club that would lose it’s Football League status, regain it and then lose it again and a Lancashire club that has, in effect, had to start again from scratch. A free transfer move took him to a club which didn’t seem to know which country it was in and there was another loan move to the same Lancashire club before a finish in non League football with National League stalwarts who’ve never made it into the Football League and a town which is currently receiving some Savage treatment – who am I describing?
80s. Tax people initially served ogre (5,7).
90s. Pray turtle is ready to turn out for England!(6,6)
00s. Crossroads stalwart meets star nominated for five consecutive best actress Oscars and Blackburn end up with a centreback!
10s. What is the Cardiff City related link between goalkeepers Jake Kean and Grzegorz Sandomierski?
20s. Harass male twice?
Answers
60s. Dick Mulvaney began his football career with Billingham Synthonia (Synthonia being a contraction of synthetic ammonia, a product manufactured by the company the club was affiliated to). Mulvaney’s only defeat in five meetings with City while a Blackburn player came in the 4-1 defeat they suffered at Ninian Park in November 1970 in the first game after the sale of John Toshack. Mulvaney also came on as a sub in a 1-1 draw between the clubs in January 1967 where my brother then sixn and a half) spent most of the time going back and forth to the toilets at the corner of the Bob Bank and Grange End – he must have used those toilets more times in that ninety minutes than I did in the whole of the forty six years I watched us playing at Ninian Park! Going back to Dick Mulvaney, he also played at Boundary Park, Oldham and for Rochdale, the town represented by Cyril Smith MP for many years, before he finished his career with Gateshead.
70s. Newcastle born goalkeeper John Butcher played for Blackburn, Oxford United, Chester, Altrincham and Macclesfield and had a couple of loan spells at Bury as well as one with Halifax.
80s. Roger Devries.
90s. Stuart Ripley.
00s. Noele (Gordon Greer) Garson.
10s.Sandomierski came on as a substitute for the injured Kean in Blackburn’s 3-0 loss at Cardiff City Stadium in April 2013.
20s. Harry Chapman.