Blackburn Rovers F.C. in 2005-06
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by user Bobo
This year, Blackburn Rovers secured a sixth-placed spot in the league, after Chelsea frankly stopped trying once they knew they'd reached the title. As a result, the Premier League leaders finished the season on 91 points and having only scored 72 goals.
The team have also qualified for next year's UEFA Cup, being the sixth-placed team and being offered the place in lieu of Carling Cup winners Manchester United. With no super-high scorers in their team (the highest scorer, Craig Bellamy, scored thirteen, in contrast to Thierry Henry's haul of twenty-seven, and Morten Gamst Pedersen's tally of nine, the second highest for the Blackburn team), this new set of young Blackburn players have once again relied on great co-operation to get their goals in. Coupled with that, they managed to do the Home/Away double over Manchester United, something which very few teams, even these days, manage to do.
Their dealings in the transfer market have become very interesting. They've bought Yugoslavian-born Finnish international Shefki Kuqi from Ipswich, while his brother Njazi remains at recently-relegated Birmingham City, for the time being, at least.
Blackburn's league positioning, like so many other teams, has been weakened (albeit only slightly) on account of their poor away form. An interesting slant on these statistics is the differential between the number of points they scored away during the season (21 from 18 games, six wins, three draws and ten losses) and convert this to the same winning ratio as they had at home (thirteen wins, three draws, and three losses, at 42 points). 84 points would have been theirs, and this season, that would have converted itself into a second placed finish. Yet, having seen Chelsea drop only two points from 57 at home all season, to accrue such a high winning rate would only serve to make Chelsea seem even more invincible than they actually are, and, as the boys in blue and white proved with a fabulous one to nothing victory on the second-last day of the season, this is nothing if not untrue.
With former Manchester United man Hughes at the helm, a man who took the Welsh national team from relative obscurity to victors against Italy in the Euro 2004 qualifying stages, and with a contract to last him until 2009, absolutely nothing is stopping Blackburn from getting even better next season.
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