26Sep

Enough is enough, it’s time Venky’s hit the road

by Mike Calvin

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Life used to be so simple for the good folk at Venkateshwara Hatcheries. They made a fortune processing chicken meat, developing pathogen-free eggs and selling day-old chicks. Then they had a brainstorm and paid £23m for Blackburn Rovers.

That’s a lot of money to become a laughing stock on a global scale. From the moment Blackburn’s new co-owners, Balaji and Venkatesh Rao, walked out on to the Ewood Park pitch, looking like extras from a Bollywood version of Pulp Fiction, the only way was down.

They and the matriarch of the Venky’s family, Anuradha Desai, wasted no time in making their biggest mistake, sacking Sam Allardyce. They have been inept to the point of incredulity ever since.

Quite why they are involved in a game they don’t understand, at an institution for which they obviously have no respect, has yet to be adequately explained. Blackburn have a current resale value of about 23 pence and are gambling Premier League parachute payments on players of marginal quality earning £50,000 a week.

Steve Kean may have the boundless enthusiasm and pleading eyes of a puppy at a rescue centre, but he is no one’s idea of a football manager. He’s a human punchbag, with a win record of just 28 per cent. The black humour at his survival as Blackburn boss has soured into anger and contempt.

Everyone accepts that his sacking is a matter of time, but Venky’s can’t do the decent thing and put him out of his misery. The club is rudderless and haemorrhaging support. The few fans who can be bothered to attend matches started to squabble among themselves before uniting behind a newly launched supporters’ trust. The mood is bitter, dark and self-destructive.

Blackburn have somehow promoted an indifferent press officer into a position of influence in the boardroom. But their greatest gift to comedy has been their so-called global adviser, Shebby Singh. He’s a former Asian TV pundit who played for Malaysia in an era when they would have struggled in the Blackburn & District Football Combination.

Singh has made more gaffes than Mr Bean, approaching crisis management in a state of permanent bemusement. He excelled himself during the latest round of speculation about Kean’s future by admitting the situation at the club “gets worse by the day”.

He could make it an awful lot better by leaving and persuading his benefactors to stick to what they do best, in the poultry markets of southern India.

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