PETER Whittingham will become a key cog in the Blackburn Rovers engine room next season, according to head coach Tony Mowbray.

Mowbray made investing in quality in the middle of the pitch one of his main priorities this summer after relegation to League One, with 32-year-old Whittingham becoming his first signing earlier this week.

The Rovers boss is now working hard behind the scenes to further add to his ranks following the capture of Whittingham on a two-year deal.

But he believes that the creative midfield man can have a key role to play next season.

“I see those sort of players as like the oil that keeps the system running really,” Mowbray said.

“You give the ball to good players and they understand the systems and the positional play of the players in front of him, and they see the movement happening and they leave the ball in the right spaces and holes.

“They see the pictures and, as I say, they’re like the oil in the engine. They keep picking the right passes and sometimes as a football coach you have these pictures in your head of how you want your team to play and if you haven’t got the right cogs in the right places it just keeps breaking down.

“But Peter Whittingham, hopefully, with the pictures I have of how I want the team to play, will make it fluid and help us play as we want to.”

Rovers have seen 12 players leave the club since May, while Connor Mahoney looks certain to move to pastures new, with Championship side Nottingham Forest currently leading the chase for the out-of-contract 20-year-old.

Mowbray would, in an ideal world, want the bulk of his squad for next term together for when the squad return to pre-season training later this month and hopes his recruitment drive will gather pace in the coming weeks.

The head coach also wants Rovers to stand firm should there be in any interest in the club’s under-contract players who he hopes can lead the club to immediate promotion back to the Championship.

Whittingham played 450 times for Cardiff, scoring an impressive 98 goals, during a 10 year stay in South Wales. He was offered a new deal by the Bluebirds, but on reduced terms, and opted for the move to East Lancashire after meeting with Mowbray.

And the attitude of the former Aston Villa man impressed Mowbray, who added: “As I said before, I like footballers who like football, who want to ask questions, who watch the matches in midweek and want to come in and talk about the players they’ve seen in the Champions League – and Peter hits me as one of those footballers who just loves football.

“At 32, he wants to enjoy his football in the coming years, so I think he’s made that decision to come to a team that hopefully are going to have a fair bit of the ball in this league and are hopefully going to score lots of goals and create, and he can be integral to that.”