Mowbray Moulds Blackburn Into Automatic Promotion Contenders

At the start of the campaign, Blackburn wouldn’t have been fancied by many to get a promotion push up and running. After all, they sold last season’s top scorer Adam Armstrong to Southampton, and you could say they never replaced him. But, against all the odds, Blackburn have now entered the automatic promotion race.

Tony Mowbray, 58, has been manager of the Ewood Park outfit since the 2016/17 campaign. And, in that time, there have been a lot of ups and downs, with more of the latter than the former. However, the experienced Mowbray still boasts an impressive record of taking 1.50 points per game throughout his tenure.

After the goalscoring form of Armstrong last season, it was always going to prove a challenge for Blackburn to live up to any sort of expectations. He weighed in with a stunning twenty-eight strikes from forty Championship appearances, which was some going. But, Mowbray had a secret weapon in his ranks in Ben Brereton Diaz, who he believed would always come good after a slow start to his time at Blackburn.

Brereton Diaz, 22, has twenty goals from twenty-seven league outings so far, and his goals have helped to propel Rovers into the promotion reckoning. But, it’s the work Mowbray has done over the last five seasons, often in the face of adversity, that has led Blackburn to where they are now.

Monday night saw Blackburn host an in-form Middlesbrough team, who have been superb since Chris Wilder’s arrival as manager. And, they were taking on their promotion-chasing rival without Brereton Diaz, who is on international duty with Chile. However, Brereton Diaz’s absence didn’t show, with Blackburn more than holding their own, winning the game 1-0 thanks to an excellent finish from Sam Gallagher.

It's often the case that when you’re talisman is missing, a team will struggle to get results because they may lack that bit of confidence. And, let's face it, Blackburn know that with Brereton Diaz on the pitch, they have the ability to score goals, which usually leads to three points. But Mowbray has given his team and players the belief that they’re all integral if the club is to be successful on the pitch, and it showed against Boro, as it has so many other times previously.

Sam Gallagher, a player who you could suggest, is in Brereton Diaz’s shadow and is often shoehorned into a wide position to accommodate the Chile international, does fantastic work to the side but is a central striker by trade. And, in Brereton Diaz’s absence, he more than shows his capabilities, and now has six goals to his name for the season, and is the club’s second-highest scorer.

If Blackburn are going to cement themselves as automatic promotion hopefuls, they will need to carry on in the same vein of form. And they will need Mowbray to continue to work his magic in getting all members of his squad to deliver, including the multiple academy graduates who are now regulars in the first team.