We spoke to Watford reporter Andrew French to get the lowdown on new head coach Valérien Ismaël and what he will bring to Rovers.
Former Barnsley, West Brom and Watford boss Ismaël has penned a deal until June 2028 at Ewood Park.
The Frenchman arrives in East Lancashire with Rovers sitting sixth in the Championship table heading into the final 12 games of the campaign.
How would you sum up Ismaël’s time at Watford?
When he came in there was no doubt they were looking for a change of culture behind the scenes. It was quite well known that people were late to training, didn't train very hard or mucked about a bit, they weren't particularly professional. Ismaël is a strict disciplinarian and one of the first things he did was come in and form a leadership group of senior players. They came up with a set of rules and he stuck by them.
Very early on there were two or three players who were either demoted to the bench or left out altogether because they had broken one of the rules, and that could be something like turning up late for training or being late to a team meeting. He didn't really care what the rule was; if you broke it, you got punished and it happened to players who were playing in the first team.
It went down OK because that's what the club wanted and we didn't make too bad of a start. We won our first game of the season 4-0, we were brilliant. It wasn't a totally inspiring start but then out of nowhere the club gave him a new contract. I think that was the club wanting to show, or attempting to show, they'd gone through this hire and fire phase and were going to stick by him.
By early October, we were one point above the relegation zone. We went to Sunderland and got beat 2-0, and he locked them in for an hour after the game. At that point, had he not had the three-year contract I think he would have gone. He then improved and we suddenly went from being just above the relegation zones to just outside the play-off places. Then we started to plateau and the home form under Ismaël was awful. We went about six months without a home win.
We had a terrible January transfer window. He had his targets and when they didn't come, he wouldn't take anybody else. Ironically, the only signing we made was Emmanuel Dennis on loan from Forest but he was out of shape for the first month and could only play about 15 or 20 minutes. That was the only signing and, coupled with the loss in form, he was on borrowed time. He went early March and I think most people would agree that, although we had the good run in the middle, generally speaking, it wasn't particularly pretty to watch.
How would you describe Ismaël’s style of play and is he capable of mixing up his approach?
We were quite dour, not negative but we would tend to spend a lot of the first half shadow boxing to see what the other team had. They weren't playing by the same rules so often we'd be a goal down before we knew what happened. He was very safety first, massively into possession.
Before he came to Watford he was known at West Brom and Barnsley for being very direct. That's what we were expecting him to be, hitting the channel balls, but when he came to Watford he went much more possession based. I talked to him about it and he said he's not a manager who pigeonholes himself. He will adapt the way he approaches games to the players he's got available to him. He thought Watford had players that were more suited to a passing style, whereas when he was at West Brom and Barnsley they had more of a direct style of group of players.
My feeling would be that, bearing in mind we've got a dozen games to go, he's going to go with whatever he thinks the group of players are best suited to. He won't try and knock a square peg into a round hole. He's very diligent, he will have watched a lot of games and done his homework. I would imagine he'll come in knowing that there's a certain way he has to play because of what he's got available to him.
Does he arrive at Rovers with a point to prove?
He had a rough time of it at Besiktas. He was doing OK at West Brom, it was similar to what happened at Watford. He was doing alright for a while and then in the second half of the season it fell away because he can be a little bit rigid. There were times in games where it was crying out for us to do something different and he just wouldn't. He stuck with the system that he was playing.
He will tell you he's got nothing to prove. He's a good talker, he's a very intelligent bloke. But if you look back over his career, other than the Barnsley period where he did very well, he's not really done too much recently, but he can. He did well for Watford for a certain period of time with quite a limited group of players, but he wasn't very flexible and when Plan A didn't work, we really didn't have Plan B.
