"ONE of the biggest jobs when you take over a club is to get rid of the rubbish. The players who don’t have any value, whether that’s financially or to the team. That is the hardest job of any manager these days to offload the players you don’t want.

“I still keep being reminded of how much money we have spent but I don’t remember spending a lot since I’ve been here. We have improved the squad, trimmed it down and we are a better side because of it.”

They are not the words of Rovers boss Gary Bowyer – although they easily could be – but of Nigel Pearson, the man who has just led Leicester to automatic promotion, and they come from a national newspaper article that has been doing the rounds in the corridors of power at Ewood Park this week.

In it Pearson stresses that the success the Foxes have enjoyed this season should not be taken in isolation, that it is the result of the work that has gone in his two-and-a-half-years in charge.

No wonder the article has struck such a chord at Ewood as Rovers find themselves at a similar juncture to the one that Leicester were at when they re-appointed Pearson in November 2011.

That is a club trying to shift its expensive deadwood while at the same time attempting to build a new team capable of winning promotion, on a budget that is removed from the wild excesses of the summer of 2012 when £30,000-a-week contracts were handed out like confetti.

And whatever happens between now and the end of this season – which suddenly, on the back of back-to-back wins, is very much alive – there is no question that Rovers have made progress on that front.

Yes there is still a lot more to be done and it will only be when the likes of Dickson Etuhu, Leon Best and DJ Campbell are off the wage bill that the dark financial clouds that continue to hover ominously over the club will lift further.

But rays of sunshine have begun to break through.

Anyone who had the pleasure of watching Rovers sweep aside QPR on Tuesday night would testify to that.

Take Jordan Rhodes and Paul Robinson out of the equation and that was a team that cost around £900,000, the combined price of Tom Cairney, Craig Conway and Rudy Gestede.

Rovers played with no little verve, energy and ambition and proved without doubt they have the seeds of a good side in place.

But for those seeds to grow patience is required.

It worked at Leicester and it must be given a chance to work here.