BLACKPOOL are 10 points adrift of Championship safety and have not won away from home all season, but Gary Bowyer has warned his Blackburn Rovers players not to expect an easy ride tomorrow.

The Tangerines have looked doomed for relegation this term ever since they arrived at the halfway point of pre-season with only eight players on their books.

MORE TOP STORIES:

The season started with six straight defeats and Jose Riga’s short and unhappy reign ended in late October, before Lee Clark took over the helm.

Blackpool’s team is much changed since Rudy Gestede scored twice to give Rovers a 2-1 win at Bloomfield Road in August – in fact only three players who started that day were in the team that faced Nottingham Forest on Saturday.

But Clark’s side battled back with nine men to claim a 4-4 draw against Forest, and Bowyer says that must serve as a warning that Blackpool will not just roll over at Ewood Park tomorrow.

“You only have to take into consideration their game against Nottingham Forest, men sent off, men injured but they stuck in there and got an equaliser,” the Rovers boss said.

“If you know Lee Clark you know that they’re going to be coming here fighting. I think if you asked Dougie Freedman if you score four goals away from home he’d have expected to win the game, but they didn’t so that shows you that Blackpool are alive and kicking.

“The turnover in players there has been huge, but we’ll do our preparation properly ad get ready to face the team they put out.

“We’ve got to approach it in a total professional manner and treat them with the respect we showed Stoke last Saturday.”

Rovers currently sit 10 points behind the play-off places but the Blackpool clash is the first of back to back home games, with Norwich arriving at Ewood on Tuesday.

Bowyer said: “It’s right that people expect you to win your home games and that’s what we’ll certainly be trying to do.

“We’ve got to play teams who are above us and we have opportunities to claw that gap back, but we’ve got to take it one game at a time.”

Bowyer hopes Ben Marshall will be able to return to training next week after a shoulder problem, while Corry Evans is due to train today after injury forced him off at Cardiff in midweek.

David Dunn is getting closer to a return from a calf problem but Jason Lowe could miss the rest of the season after it was decided that he needs surgery on a recurrence of his broken foot.

“It’s a huge disappointment for the lad and for us as well,” the manager said. “There’s no rush on him, there’s no timescale on it but if he was to make an appearance before the end of the season it would be very late on.

“We’ve got to adopt a sensible approach to it. If he does make anything before the end of the season it would be a massive bonus.

“He did it in the Stoke game in pre-season and played on with it for seven weeks, that’s credit to him, he thought it was just an irritation and when we actually scanned it that was the first time we found a fracture.”