Blackburn Rovers got a promotion boost from Leeds United before Dack and Graham stepped up: View | OneFootball

The summer of 2017 saw something of an overhaul at Ewood Park for Blackburn Rovers.

Just a few weeks before, the 2016/17 season had ended in agonising circumstances, with the club relegated from the Championship to League One, despite a final day win at Brentford.

That left the Lancashire side facing up to the prospect of playing in the third-tier of English for the first time since 1980.

As a result, while numerous players would move on in the event of relegation, the expectation to make an immediate return to the Championship, meant there were plenty more arriving at Blackburn at that time.

Blackburn recruited heavily in the summer of 2017

By the time the 2017 summer transfer window had closed, there had been plenty of work done on the squad at Ewood Park.

In total, no fewer than 12 new players were added to the first-team squad available to head coach Tony Mowbray.

One of those who made the move to Blackburn Rovers at that point was Marcus Antonsson.

The attacker made the move to Lancashire on a season-long loan deal from Leeds United, who he had joined the season before.

His debut campaign at Elland Road has seen Antonsson score three goals in 21 games for the Whites, as they finished seventh in the Championship.

Blackburn will therefore have been hoping the Swede would be able to play a part in their push for promotion back to the second-tier.

Although the campaign would prove to be something of a mixed bag for Antonsson, there is certainly an argument that he did make an important contribution to that.

Antonsson gave Blackburn's promotion push the start it needed

By the end of November 2017, some four months into that campaign, the Leeds loanee looked as though he was going to be a key player for Rovers that season.

At that point, Antonsson was the Ewood Park club's top scorer, having scored seven goals in the 19 league games they had played up until that moment in time.

Indeed, Blackburn had won all six league games in which the Swede had found the back of net.

Those contributions ensured, that they sat fourth in the League One table, three points adrift of the automatic promotion spots.

However, it was then that things would start to change for Antonsson. The goals would dry up for him in a Blackburn shirt after November 2017, and he did not score again for the club.

There were some chances to change that not taken, and instead, the Swede started to slip down the pecking order at Ewood Park.

Fortunately for Rovers though, there were others ready to step into the breach to keep their promotion push going.

Fellow summer signing Bradley Dack - who of course went on to become an Ewood Park icon - had started to find his goalscoring touch just as Antonsson was losing his, and he would score a further 12 league goals from the start of December until the end of the season.

Similarly, Danny Graham, who had scored just twice in the league that season by the end of November, also added a further 12 goals to his tally.

Meanwhile, Charlie Mulgrew would supply another eight league goals after November that season.

Elsewhere, Adam Armstrong scored nine times in the league following his arrival, at the time on loan, from Newcastle United in the 2018 January transfer window.

All of that meant that even with Antonsson unable to make the same impact he had at the start of the campaign, Blackburn still had the firepower they needed to get over the line and secure an immediate promotion back to the Championship.

Indeed, it also saw them move to sign Armstrong on a permanent deal at the end of the campaign, in what proved a profitable deal on and off the pitch at Ewood Park.

The same was not to be said for Antonsson, whose move to Blackburn was not made permanent following that dip in form. Instead the attacker returned to his native Sweden in the summer of 2018, joining Malmo on a three-year deal from Leeds.

Now 32-years-old, he has never returned to English football, and is instead currently playing in Australia for Western Sydney Wanderers.

But without his goals at the start of the 2017/18 campaign, there is a chance that Blackburn would not have had the platform to push on through the likes of Graham, Dack, Armstrong and Mulgrew later in the campaign, and secure that all important swift return to the Championship.

For that at least, Antonsson's name is one that ought to always at least be remembered rather fondly, around Ewood Park.