"Strange" - Blackburn Rovers decision involving Owen Coyle still shocks to this day | OneFootball

The former Clarets boss was never a popular appointment at Ewood Park

This article is part of Football League World's 'Terrace Talk' series, which provides personal opinions from our FLW Fan Pundits regarding the latest breaking news, teams, players, managers, potential signings and more…

Blackburn Rovers fans could likely go on for hours about the ample poor decisions their club have made over the past few seasons, with the Premier League days well and truly behind them.

As the dust upon that top flight trophy continues to grow, the Lancashire outfit have established themselves back in the Championship, after dropping down into League One during their darkest hour, with the club reaching its lowest ebb in 2017.

Just five years after falling out of the top division, Ewood Park was left playing host to third tier football after a series of bad decisions saw the club in free fall, with one key managerial appointment costing them dearly.

It’s safe to say that Owen Coyle isn’t the most popular man around the club after his time in the dugout, as Football League World’s Blackburn Rovers fan pundit Toby Wilding expands on.

Owen Coyle appointment leads to Blackburn Rovers demise

After the farcical tenure of Steve Kean saw Rovers drop down from the Premier League, Gary Bowyer had a stint in charge at Ewood Park, before Paul Lambert lasted just seven months in the role.

The club needed to make a worthy appointment in the summer of 2016 to turn fortunes around at the club, but the arrival of Coyle did nothing of the sort, with the new arrival’s allegiance to local rivals Burnley doing nothing for his popularity levels at his new club.

With the feeling towards him frosty from the off, the Scot failed to win over the fanbase with results on the pitch, with no wins in the first seven matches of the season highlighting the issues he had at the club.

In fact, he only lasted until the following February, but the damage had already been done, with Tony Mowbray unable to halt Rovers’ relegation into the third tier, something that still wrangles Wilding to this day.

The Rovers fan said: ”The appointment as Owen Coyle as manager in 2016 is one for me that still stands out.

“Obviously at the time he was coming into the club off the back of some pretty disappointing managerial runs elsewhere, and given his connection with Burnley he was always going to have a job to win over the fans, which he never did after a poor start.

“I think as well, when you look at some of the other managers the club was being linked with at the time, I know Neil Warnock was one that would have been a much more reliable, proven option in the Championship.

“It did seem a strange decision to make at the time, bringing in someone with not a great record, and a strong connection to the biggest rivals of the club.

“Perhaps not surprisingly, it did backfire and Blackburn did end up being relegated that season.”

Owen Coyle’s Blackburn Rovers managerial record

That seven-game winless run to start the season was just the tip of the iceberg for Coyle, with victories proving hard to come by during his spell in charge in Lancashire.

In total, the former Burnley man managed just seven wins over the 31 league matches he took charge of at Turf Moor, with 16 of those fixtures ending in defeat.

The fact that the former Premier League Champions were on a run of just two successes in 13 league games shows everything you need to know about the current Chennaiyin FC manager’s time in charge, with the club’s hierarchy pulling the plug before the season came to an end.

What looked like a bad move from the off turned out to be even worse than expected, with Rovers left ruing that decision for a lot longer than expected, with a season in the third tier to stew on their past mistakes.