Rovers are in trouble, but do they know it? Are the results mattering enough? The words coming out of the club, and the way the team are playing, wouldn’t suggest so.

Runs of form can be selective, or subjective, include one game more, or fewer, and they can be easily skewed. Yet with Rovers, that’s simply not the case. Whether you take the last six, eight, 10, 12, 15, 20 or 25 games, they are in the bottom three of the form table in all of them.

From the last 20 games, no-one has a worse record than Rovers’ 18 points. Take the biggest sample size of 25 games, and they’re only off bottom spot on goal difference, something that’s being slowly eroded away by each passing defeat.

Then there’s the home form. From the last eight Ewood games, they have six points, only two teams have a worse record.

Goals scored? Well, take your pick from the last six, eight, 10, 12 or 25 games, no team has scored fewer. In the opening 15 games, 29 goals scored, in their 25 games since, just 21.

Rovers would need to win all six remaining matches to top last season’s tally of 63 points, yet more pertinent is the fact they’re still five shy of the 51 that saw them relegated in 2016/17.

With still five of the sides below them still to play, the gap to the bottom three could get worryingly close.

The odds would suggest that their 46 points may well be enough, and their destiny is within their own hands given their fixtures. Yet should there be a high tide for the final relegation place in terms of points, what was looking like another season of mid-table obscurity could become quite a frantic finish, and how unnecessary and avoidable that would be.

Given the fact we’re even contemplating this given the start they had, and their expectations, it shows how much of a free fall this season has become.

Compare and contrast the post-match words of Nigel Pearson whose Bristol City side are three points, and three places, better off than Rovers.

After the defeat at Coventry City, the Bristol City boss said: “It’s a situation at the moment where I think our players have to understand that we are still very much in a fragile position. We’re certainly not safe and if we play like that for the rest of the season, we’re in danger of being relegated.”

That message is at least comfort that there is a realisation of what could happen. Yet Mowbray preferred to focus on the performance of his side, rather than the results, but there simply is no getting away from the run that Rovers are on, and the trouble that’s plummeted them towards.

Performances will only cloud results for so long, and it’s hard to make a case that the displays have been of such a level they should have warranted many more points. Right now it’s hard to see where the next goal, or point, will come from.

There is a growing feeling that Rovers are setting themselves up for a root and branch review of all aspects of the club in the summer. What do they want to become and how do they see themselves progressing?

Once this season is out, Mowbray will be coming into the final 12 months of the three-and-half year deal he signed in 2018, while several senior players are out of contract and the five loanees will return to their parent clubs.

That would then see a squad rebuild on a budget that would require some shrewd moves to cover those spaces.

Yet the summer feels a long way off and having not yet reached 50 points, Rovers still have the present to address, before they can think about the future.

Mowbray wouldn’t be drawn on the support, and the reasons for it, from the Rovers hierarchy, having himself admitted that few managers survive the run that he’s on, yet one must be the job he’s done as a whole across his four years.

That started with him trying to fend off the threat of relegation, and 40 games into his fourth full season in charge, they are heading closer to that position than ever before.

It has left fans feeling disillusioned, questioning the direction of the club, and while much of made is the work on the playing side of things this summer, off the field Rovers face the task of enticing supporters back through the turnstiles when they open. Right now, it’d be a hard sell.