Category: popular STAND fanzine

Well, thank God that’s all over. A terrible season that started badly and never really looked like getting better. A 46 game-long slow trudge towards League Two. Each of our most recent engagements with the fourth tier have ended in promotion… it’s hard to see 2022-23 going a similar way.

This is only the penultimate edition of the fanzine for 2021-22, but you won’t have to get far through its pages to see that the majority of our correspondents are already accepting of it ending in relegation. Rovers have had a mini resurgence, just before this issue went to print, but it hasn’t been enough of a revival to switch faint hopes the way of creeping beliefs.

On the opening page of issue 105 of popular STAND I promised that we wouldn’t be bottom of League One by the time issue 106 came round. I have to be honest, I was hoping to be somewhat higher than 23rd, but hey, a win’s a win.

New season, new manager, new players; a fresh start, a time for optimism. Right? Well ordinarily yes, least that’s usually the case when we put out our first issue of a Rovers campaign.

Perhaps the greatest tribute Rovers could offer in a year of false dawns over lockdown-easing and returns to normality, was a season that got us all excited about what was coming, only to emphatically disappoint and then drag on longer than anyone really cared for it. I laid the groundwork for issue 103 by telling you how upbeat the contents were, ‘a true testament to the hope and excitement that Darren Moore’s Rovers have offered us’. Come this release of 104 and that statement has aged like a fine milk.

When you’re producing four issues a season, you’d expect to have a reasonably clear picture of how that campaign is going to pan out by the time the third one reaches the hands of the reader. But this isn’t a regular season. It’s one that we’re increasingly unlikely to be present to see any of, and it’s one of such stop-startedness that when the bulk of this issue was written, even though we were bidding farewell to January, Rovers still had half of their league games yet to play.