Writing out Blackburn’s title success using Wrexham example
Colin Hendry feels it will be very difficult for a ‘local club’ to emulate Blackburn Rovers’ Premier League triumph.
Rovers won the league title 30 years ago and are one of just seven teams to have hoisted the trophy since the rebrand in 1992.
Each one of those hails from a significantly broader area than Blackburn, with titans such as Manchester United, City, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool. Even Leicester City aren’t a town club.
Given the resources of the Premier League, it now appears impossible for a team of Rovers’ relative size and population to match that success.
Whilst there are minor success stories further down the pyramid, like as Oldham Athletic, Hendry doubts there will be another ‘kid done good’ owner who can guide his club to Premier League glory.
“I don’t know the owner at Oldham, Frank Rothwell, but he’s taken his club into the football league,” Hendry told The Lancashire Telegraph on behalf of Coin Poker.
“I suppose there are analogies that can be made to Jack Walker there, since he’s a local man, done well, but he’s four tiers away from making it into the Premier League, never mind winning it!
“But you’d want to think it’s feasible. You’d like to think that it’s conceivable for another club to do what Blackburn Rovers did in 1995.
“Our achievement with Blackburn was a culmination of things moving in the correct direction at the football club for a number of years.
In the two or three years prior to it, we’d gotten promoted, we beat Leicester at Wembley in the play-off final. We were on an upward trajectory.”
Whilst there are clubs with the financial intentions to do so, it has never been tougher to climb the pyramid from top to bottom.
Even for Wrexham, under the Hollywood ownership of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, it’s a massive struggle. If anyone is likely to, Hendry thinks the Welsh club have the best shot.
“For someone to achieve that again, it’s going to be practically difficult. I don’t think it will happen,” he continued.
“A nice team to look at is Wrexham, who constantly ascending the league charts and presumably have their eyes on the Premier League. It’s a settled club, the owners are ambitious, everything is going nicely.
“I’d like to think you can live the dream, since that is what football is all about. But the huge guns in the Premier League are getting bigger and bigger.
“It’s very tough for a town club, like Blackburn were, to compete with big monsters these days. Leicester managed something extremely spectacular, but it’s a little bit different to Blackburn’s feat.”
Hendry also remarked on Alan Shearer’s exit, transferred by Rovers to his boyhood club, Newcastle United. It’s famously known that he rejected down Manchester United to join the Toon Army.
It was the second in his career that Shearer said no to Sir Alex Ferguson, with the United boss previously wanting to buy him before he came at Ewood Park.
Though Shearer did not tell much to his team-mates but Hendry thinks he will have no regrets about the career decisions he made. “Well, Alan kept his cards quite close to his breast. Even as a teammate, sharing the same changing room, he never ever spoke about the speculation or the rumours,” Hendry recalled.
“He didn’t discuss it – he was concentrated on scoring goals. To be fair, I don’t think Alan’s had any serious regrets about returning back to Newcastle.
“We all know that he could have joined Manchester United, but that’s his club, his hometown. He wanted to go back there and be someone; do something, which sadly he didn’t.
“At the same time, I don’t think the club would have sold him to Manchester United with the clubs being so near together in the North West and because of the rivalry that went on, I don’t think that Blackburn would have wanted him to join United.
“The truth is that United were looking at him when he joined Blackburn from Southampton, they were sniffing around then. So Alan turned them down twice, and not many players can say that!
“I think he was fairly delighted with the decision to go to Newcastle. He’s gone on record as well as saying that Newcastle winning the Carabao Cup this season was one of the finest, if not the greatest success that he’s ever felt, so he’s a die-hard Newcastle man.
“He won the Premier League with Blackburn, and then I think he was very content just to go back to Newcastle. That’s his hometown club, that’s his club. And you understand that.
“He may not have won more trophies for the club, but he scooped up all kinds of individual records, obviously is still the record-scorer in the Premier League and he lives his dream. He’ll have no regrets.”
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