Henrik Lloyd on communications problems at Rovers...

"I haven't spoken to the manager about my future and I feel let down. The first I knew about Clarkey playing the final nine games of the season was when it appeared in the papers. If he had told me himself it wouldn't have been a problem, I just don't like the way it's been handled” .

Kevin Miller, last year’s player of the season

"I heard from a player from another club at the weekend that I was going on the list, although at the time I laughed it off. But the manager had a word with me after training on Monday and told me what was happening”.

Christian Edwards

The more snippets of information you get about events behind the scenes at Rovers the more you wonder if that is the fundamental problem as to why we have been under-achieving on the pitch for so long rather than anything else.

Certainly the perpetual failure to get a firm grasp on the club’s finances has been an undermining factor in a number of campaigns over the last few years, but less documented is the problem we seem to have with regard to how we communicate with and treat our players. That’s been a problem going all the way back to when Roberts and Cureton were absurdly blamed for us failing to get promoted in 1999-2000 and the two quotes – both made in the last few days - indicate that we don’t seem to have learnt any lessons in the five years since.

It may seem a bit of a management-speak phrase, but players are the tools which will help a club get promotion. They need to be fit, stay fit, be properly organised and motivated if you’re to have any hope of getting promoted.

The latter is key in the lower divisions, where skill and fitness levels are often much of a muchness. But can you really expect players to be fully motivated when they are treated so abysmally? Add to the two quotes above the John Anderson debacle of a month or so back and the very public efforts all season to get Ryan Williams off the wage bill and you maybe get a bit closer to understanding why we’ve failed to achieve our potential for the umpteenth season in a row. These things must feed through to the other members of the squad and make them either uncertain about their own futures or less inclined to perform for their employees.

The general feeling that Rovers is not a happy place to be as an employee is further bolstered by the recent comments from the manager about there being "a lot of baggage" at Rovers and ex-captain Adam Barrett’s comments prior to that LDV tie that “it was tough at Rovers because things did not go well on the pitch and there was a lot going on in the background too". Read into that what you may.