CCFC 3 v 0 BLACKBURN

The last couple of years in the history of Blackburn Rovers read like a naff Channel 5 documentary, along the lines of 'When Football Clubs Go Wrong'. It's a stark warning to football fans everywhere of the potential disaster that looms when a cash-rich foreign entrepreneur decides for reasons of greed and ego to take a punt on your club.

The story goes that the Venky family saw the purchase of a Premier League club (any old club would do) as a way of promoting their brand of downmarket sub-KFC fast food outlets. £23 million represented little more than the advertising and marketing budget for the £multi-billion business.

For the Venkys the episode has proved to be a salutary lesson in sticking to what you know. Their first mistake on assuming ownership was apparently being unaware that it is possible to be relegated from the Premier League. Of course this could be apocryphal but it seems entirely plausible when placed against subsequent events:

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•  November 2010. Sam Allardyce is sacked within a month of the takeover. The team is 13th in the table.

•  Steve Kean with no managerial experience is given the job until the end of the season but within a month is handed a 3 year contract after an indifferent start.

•  One year later, having narrowly survived relegation with a win on the last day of the previous season the club is struggling again and the Rovers fans announce a 'Week of Mourning', laying wreaths at the ground, marking the death of their club. Kean's contract is extended despite his protestations to the owners that actually it probably isn't a good idea.

• Kean sells fans' favourite Christopher Samba and hires a bodyguard as the Rovers fans continue to struggle to gain a proper perspective of their predicament, issuing death threats.

• May 2012. Relegated to the Championship.

• Season 2012/13. After a poor start to life in the lower leagues Kean falls on his sword. Enter Hening Berg. 57 days later Berg's off. Enter Michael Appleton with a distinguished managerial record to rival that of the much-maligned Kean - in his twelve game tenure at Blackpool he achieved a staggering win ratio of 16.67%. After 67 days the Venky's decide that Appleton is rotten to the core.

• Rovers currently lie just 4 points clear of the relegation zone.

It's tempting to have a wry smile at the misfortune of rival clubs but a recent fan's article in The Independent includes the following ominous condemnation of the owner's failure to appreciate the club and its fans: ' Venky's have yet to understand that a major English football club is not A.N.Other franchise...but a unique entity to which their followers (their 'market' in other words) are viscerally and permanently attached'.

Imagine. Asian owners using a football club as a tool to promote their global enterprises, deaf to the fans' pleading and prepared to ride roughshod over generations of tradition, treating their affiliation and lineage as little more than capital stock.

And so..... we face our opponents today knowing that a mere 14 points from our remaining games will secure promotion. We knew that before Saturday's game against Peterboro. It didn't help us. But 4 wins and 2 draws from 8 games (and that's assuming Watford win ALL their games) isn't beyond even us. Surely. Is it??

The recent run of disturbingly unconvincing jittery performances have understandably led to much debate about how Malky might make best use of his engorged squad. Certain players look jaded (Whittingham, Smith) others are playing under the weight of unrealistic expectations (Campbell, Bellamy) and others fail to convince regularly enough to justify selection (Helguson, Cowie). It's been apparent to many of us that fringe players like Kim and Mason deserve a chance and if Whittingham is not to be allowed to play in a position that allows him to dictate the game, perhaps it's time to reshape midfield to freshen things up for the run-in.

In a rare outbreak of consensus between fans and manager Malky chose today to do exactly that. As the pre-match singalong concluded with The Smiths contemplating what difference a few changes in the starting line-up would make and warning that the fans would stand for 'no more apologies' Kim and Jordan Mutch took their places in a new look midfield with the previously indispensible Whittingham sitting it out.

What we really needed today was a performance as convincing as the one at Ewood Park when we eased to a 4-1 win back in early December. Performances of that quality since have been as rare as a bluebird in British springtime.

It was apparent early on that both the shape and commitment of our reinvigorated midfield was going to be key to our success as Blackburn, devoid of any creative ideas sought to impose themselves on the game with a series of vicious tackles that were if not cynical then were certainly deployed with a heavy sarcasm displaying a certain world-weariness. The referee was pretty much out of his depth, allowing six bookable tackles in the first 30 minutes before finally showing his first yellow. For dissent.

The resurgent Bluebirds were closing down the opposition, panicking them into mistakes, always first to any loose ball and in total control. After a series of corners, near misses and shots cleared off the line we finally made the breakthrough after the sixth corner of the first half as Campbell was allowed to find space at the far post stooping to conquer, placing a low header into an undefended net.

The second half was a slightly more even affair, albeit with only one side ever likely to come out on top. Blackburn rang the changes but even a squad containing names to which the epithet 'household' might reasonably have been attached in recent times - David Bentley, Leon Best, Morton Gamst Pedersen, Jordon Rhodes - failed to make a mark as we continued to dominate.

The sub-heading under the 'Cardiff 3' column reads Mason 85, Whittingham 90 (pen) but those bare statistics do little to emphasise the true nature of this convincing victory. Far more insightful are the 'Shots' and 'Shots on target' columns which show 20 - 2 and 15 - 0 in our favour.

At this stage of the season the average bi-polar Bluebird exists in one of two states of mind that are equally irrational and opposite - despair or hope. With a mere 11 points now required we should be brimming with optimism but, in the words of the old sage and reflecting the experiences of City fans down the ages 'Hope is nearly as strong as despair'.