David Conn/The Guardian
Michael Appleton's sacking by Blackburn exposes Venky's madness
Indian owners are close to wrecking a famous club with their increasingly insane decisions
Blackburn Rovers supporters close to weeping at the sacking of yet another manager, the third full-time occupant this season, this time after only 67 days in the post, can now identify the club's owners, Venky's, with Albert Einstein's famous definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
In the characteristic absence, yet again, of any comment from the Indian chicken company that bought Rovers in 2010, there can seem no other explanation for what they have done to the famous Lancashire club than that it is all madness.
Pull back from the desperate details for a moment, the near unbelievable sequence of events that began with Venky's ownership immediately being defined by the peremptory sacking of Sam Allardyce, the manager who kept the club in the Premier League from his 2008 appointment. Venky's persisted with his replacement, the inexplicably-appointed Steve Kean, until after Rovers were relegated from the Premier League last season, but then Kean finally left in September after he was backed to sign nine players in the summer, including the £8m Jordan Rhodes, and with Rovers riding high in the Championship.
Shebby Singh, hired as their global football advisor after being watched on Malaysian television commentating as a pundit on English football, then waited weeks to find "just the right candidate", before landing on Henning Berg, who cut a haunted figure prior to Venky's sacking him less than two months later.
Now comes the next abrupt, unexplained sacking: Michael Appleton, appointed in January to make Rovers his own third club in two months, when he hopped across from Blackpool, to whom he had moved from Portsmouth in November. Venky's supported him to substantially change the playing squad – including selling Mauro Formica to Palermo, and loaning Rubén Rochina to Zaragoza.. Deeply relevant are the wholesale sackings or resignations of the stable and highly regarded group of directors and executives Venky's inherited, led by the chairman John Williams, who had maintained Rovers as a respected Premier League club for, in hindsight, a remarkably extended period since promotion in 2001.
The effort to make sense of Venky's decision-making and attitude to the football club they bought boils down to this salient fact. Rovers' average attendance this season is 14,665. In 2010-11, only two seasons ago and Venky's first in charge, the Ewood Park average in the Premier League was 25,008.
The club's support and reputation was painstakingly rebuilt through the 1990s and 2000s, with keen effort as well as £100m from the former hometown boy turned tax-exile steel magnate Jack Walker. In only two years 10,343 people have gone. Some of that loss is the inevitable effect of relegation, but a solid club like Blackburn would normally expect to retain most of its support in the first season, buoyed by the hope of bouncing back. Yet at Ewood Park, more than the attritional football and the rapid succession of unconvincing managers, the sense of chaos and remoteness of the owners at a club known previously for shrewdness, has driven supporters away, and to distraction.
The story emerging from the Appleton sacking is that Singh was instrumental rather than the two local men who found themselves in charge at Rovers by default: Paul Agnew, the former PR man turned general manager, and Derek Shaw, who was chief executive at Preston with Agnew years ago. Whatever the truth of the internal tensions among the ghosts in the corporate corridors at Ewood Park, the responsibility for all these decisions, the state the club is in, and the dejection of supporters, rests with Venky's.
It is difficult to decipher why they have allowed all this to happen, not insisted upon the basic requirements: to have good executives in place, who would try to make managerial appointments which could be supported for longer than, say, a couple of months. Venky's Indian chicken company is a very substantial business, built up over many years. Famously the chair, Anuradha Desai, said they bought Blackburn Rovers to spread the Venky's brand name around the world. In the absence of proper communication from Pune, that makes the wreckage at Blackburn even more difficult to understand: all of this hardly reflects well on the Venky's chicken brand.
There must be more to it than madness, but there is little sense in it; another manager gone, a haemorrhage of money and a draining away of broken-hearted support.
www.guardian.co.uk/football/football-league-blog/2013/mar/19/michael-appleton-blackburn-sacking-venkys
