Duncan Barkes

He struggled for game time at Hillsborough, clocking up just 103 minutes across six appearances.

Before that, he had a tough two-season spell at Burnley, where he played only 14 times before being let go last summer.

Despite his lack of recent action, Rovers boss Michael O'Neill is clearly hoping Redmond can provide a spark for an attack that has managed only 36 league goals all season.

One less than Pompey, whose own struggles in front of goal are well known.

To get him up to speed, Redmond played 45 minutes for the under-21s this week.

After the international break, Blackburn, who have played one more game than Pompey, are away to Birmingham before hosting West Brom on bank holiday Monday.

As for Pompey, they still have one open spot in their squad, which could go to Josh Knight if he can prove he's recovered from his back injury.

So that piece of shrewd administration by Blackburn means that they have strengthened their squad significantly going into the final seven games for them of the season.

And of course, they're also technically strengthened by the fact that with Northern Ireland being knocked out of the World Cup preliminaries, their manager, Michael O'Neill, who was dividing his time between being manager of Blackburn and manager of Northern Ireland, is free now.

to concentrate on avoiding relegation for Blackburn.

Whether that means that they're going to get better results than they would have done if he was also thinking about the upcoming Bosnia and Herzegovina game, which is now something that Italy have got on their plate, only time will tell.

But on paper, Blackburn is at three points ahead of us, but we have a game in hand, are considerably strengthened by developments during the international break.

That is a...

pretty good remark i'm gonna put that one in my back pocket why don't you intelligence is chasing you but you're too fast let's hope that's not true that is if we want to bring caballero on board as a contracted pompey player do we from what we've seen of him so far do we couple of good flashes he's good at beating two men with one touch of the ball by going in between them uh

That's a well-known trick.

People will soon start to wise up to it.

And Ward will get round, so he's going to need some other tricks.

He is fast, but as that remark suggests, intelligence can be even more important than raw speed.

And just to tidy everything up, the spectator in the stand who laughed when the Pompey fans said that we've got three lone players, two from Luton, one from Santos, said,

Enjoyed the moment and chuckled quite loudly, actually, we saw.