Mid way through the second half the attendance of 1,501 flashed across the scoreboard at Ewood Park in the EFL (Checkatrade) Trophy game against Stoke City u21, many myself included assumed that this was the lowest recorded attendance for a competitive first team fixture to involve Blackburn Rovers. The previous ‘low’ was for the second leg of a Second Round League Cup match against Wimbledon having been thumped 0-5 at Plough Lane a fortnight earlier. At 10 years old I doubt I even knew that the match was being played and even if I had known I probably wouldn’t have cared. It is therefore little wonder that a paltry 2,161 trudged through the turnstiles at Ewood to see Mark Patterson and Jimmy Quinn score in a 2-1 victory.
You might well ask yourself where this is going, however it emerged last night on social media and via the blog of Jim Wilkinson today that in fact the lowest recorded attendance for a competitive first team match to involve the Rovers could have actually occurred back in the 1970/71 season during a Lancashire County Cup match against Rochdale. According to one of the several books on Rovers produced by Mike Jackman, The Lancashire Cup (also known as the Lancashire Senior Cup and the Lancashire Manx Cup) was actually a first team fixture until the competition was revived at the start of the 2004/05 season.
The game against Rochdale in the 1970/71 season was played on Tuesday 13th October 1970 and a Lancashire County Cup 2nd Round match in which Rovers lost by 0-2, included in the team were a certain Tony Parkes and Derek Fazckerley, who was named as the substitute with a recorded attendance of just 561. Not many of the other players listed mean much to me, but somehow I have a copy of the team sheet produced (in absence of a programme) as can be seen below.
So maybe, just maybe the lowest attendance wasn’t set last night, but back in the very early 1970s when coincidentally Rovers fell from the First to Third Division in the space of six short seasons.
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I was at that game and I always believed that the actual attendance was just over 1200? Im sure that the low crowd was mentioned in either the LET or Dauly Mirror the following day. It was obvious to everyone(!) that was there that this was one of the lowest ever points in Rovers proud history.
There just didn’t seem to be any possible way out of the mess that the club was in at that time . There was no money no ambition and people talked about the club folding-up just as others (like Barrow and Workington etc)had.
We could never imagine that the Rovers would ever rise to the very top of football again and win something as prestigious as the Premier League title . So even though things look black today you just never know what can happen in the future. Enjoy the successes when they come along, as they dont come along very often.
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