Many Rovers fans have been complaining about the state of Ewood Park. They say it’s beginning to look shabby and is gradually being overrun by moss.
But club owners, the Venky’s, hit back by saying this moss is there for a specific purpose. It’s actually a microbe based prototype cleaning agent, used for removing rust around the ground. As is often the case with good inventions, this was discovered by accident. Venky’s originally wanted to create a high protein moss as chicken feed. But they found when chicken dung was added, it gave it an acidic quality which enabled the moss to feed on rust
Rumours have it one of the Venky’s mislaid a rusty old iron bar in a mossy grove inhabited by chickens. When this turned up, the rust was gone. This seemed very strange and nobody could explain it. Never ones to miss a business opportunity, Venky’s saw a profitable return from marketing this potential cleaning agent, but needed to test it out somewhere without drawing attention to themselves, or their prototype.
Due to their high profile in India, they wanted to test their possible rust eating moss somewhere they could carry out their experiments with secrecy and anonymity in a discreet location. The obvious place was Blackburn Rovers’ Ewood Park. Well away from their Indian heartland and with attention diverted away from organic experiments by a football team playing matches there. They assumed most fans would be too busy watching football to really notice what was happening off the field.
Unfortunately for Venky’s, Rovers fans have not just sharp eyes, but very long memories. Nostalgia still abounds over those heady days when Jack Walker owned our club and we not only watched a great team, but were able to watch them in a clean and modern stadium.
Football matches are fixtures at Ewood Park. So are complaints about the state of our stadium and its outlying area. These started out as murmurings, complaints and funny comments on social media, but have now become another fixture of disgruntled fans’ conversations.
Only time will tell whether these mossy experiments turn out to be anything more than scotch mist. Many supporters see the moss as just another weed, which is so much a part of the fabric of Ewood Park these days. It’s going to take a lot more than a bit of foliage to convince Blackburn Rovers fans our owners really care about the ground, or the football club.
