This is disgusting,

[Mr1Croft]

Albeit it was expected we would be deemed low by the bookies but 125/1 for us to make the top 3 when Peterborough are the closest with 66/1.

So the bookies think that peterborough have a chance twice as great as ours to finish in the top 3?

pfft.

Check it out

[Chrisd_123]

Please tell me you haven't only just realised we're a small club? This has been the same pretty much every season we've been in the football league! never mind the championship

[Kenny_Senior]

Doncaster Rovers in 'written off and underestimated' shocker.

Have you got any more wonderful pearls of wisdom, Mr Croft?

[Filo]

I can`t understand why folk get worked up over bookies odds, if you disagree with them that much, have a flutter and take em to the cleaners!

[Mr1Croft]

Please tell me you haven't only just realised we're a small club? This has been the same pretty much every season we've been in the football league! never mind the championship

I can take us bieng the least faviourite in the league, I can even take us bieng below peterborough, but when their odds is half of ours? I wouldn't call them twice as good.

It'll just be twice as nice when we stuff the bookies faces and finish mid table...

[hoolahoop]

Lump on fellas , these odds are a joke

[redrover19]

who gives a crap about top 3

I fancy another trip to Wembley with Leeds Utd

[grayx]

Albeit it was expected we would be deemed low by the bookies but 125/1 for us to make the top 3 when Peterborough are the closest with 66/1.

So the bookies think that peterborough have a chance twice as great as ours to finish in the top 3?

pfft.

Check it out

I think you'll find its 125/1 to WIN the league, not top 3.

[NigelJ]

Please tell me you haven't only just realised we're a small club? This has been the same pretty much every season we've been in the football league! never mind the championship

I can take us bieng the least faviourite in the league, I can even take us bieng below peterborough, but when their odds is half of ours? I wouldn't call them twice as good.

It'll just be twice as nice when we stuff the bookies faces and finish mid table...

I think you'll find that if we finished in mid-table, the bookie would win, hence justifying the odds...

[Redandwhitewhizards]

Albeit it was expected we would be deemed low by the bookies but 125/1 for us to make the top 3 when Peterborough are the closest with 66/1.

So the bookies think that peterborough have a chance twice as great as ours to finish in the top 3?

pfft.

Check it out

Odds seem perfecly reasonable to me, Peterborough have momentumn, whereas our form over the second half of the season would have seen us relegated in most other seasons.

Bookies are rarely wrong.

[vaya]

Peterborough have momentum, but they only managed what they did last season by scoring more than they shipped - their defensive record was roughly that of relegated Bristol Rovers.

The keen-eyed amongst you may have recognised this model, but they're losing Mackail-Smith who was the club's and League One's top scorer by a mile.

[benaldo]

Considering Rovers nearly got relegated last season, have hardly any first rate defenders, one striker (who might be leaving), no money, have sold less than 4000 season tickets (meaning even less than nothing to spend on players), a geriatric keeper and no decent back up, and a mascott who attracts more attention than the football - I can't see any reason to be less than 10000000/1.

Of course, all that will change when we complete the transfer period. Just hope it's a move to shorter odds.

Some people get all excited over nothing. You can tell you haven't been supporting Rovers many years if the long Rovers odds pre-season come as a shock!

[Kenny_Senior]

Once again I find myself nodding in agreement with you Benaldo.

To put another slant on it, every season that we have been in the Championship, we have had one of the three smallest wage budgets out of everyone in the division that year. We've regularly had some of the smallest attendances in the league, so technically we should have gone down ages ago.

I know some fickle feckers want to see us launch a promotion challenge and have long winded hopes of seeing us play in the Premiership, but it would do us the great deal of good if we just stopped for a moment and remembered that we owe a great deal of gratitude to all the directors and the playing staff for keeping us in the Championship for so long.

If, as expected by a lot of pundits, we get relegated next season then so what? It should have happened three years ago technically and going on history we're nothing more than a third/fourth tier football club anyway.

We sometimes forget that clubs like Shrewsbury and Bournemouth and Brentford, who are traditionally lower league clubs that have been stuck in the lower leagues for the past twenty years or more, absolutely envy us for what we have achieved already in the past few years.

[Viking Don]

Albeit it was expected we would be deemed low by the bookies but 125/1 for us to make the top 3 when Peterborough are the closest with 66/1.

So the bookies think that peterborough have a chance twice as great as ours to finish in the top 3?

pfft.

Check it out

I think you'll find its 125/1 to WIN the league, not top 3.

Hehe, it does say 'top of the tree', which I guess could carelessly be misread as 'top three' if said quickly and maybe with a bit of an Oirish accent thrown in.

125/1 to finish in the top THREE would be amazing odds, not disgusting in the least, and I'd certainly have a few quid on that! Remember this time last year that pundits and experts alike were marking us down as dark horses for promotion, and until the injury crisis hit they were being proved correct!

Peterborough are going down though, so the bookies may have got it wrong by not making them favourites for the drop. I'll bet anyone that we'll finish higher than Peterborough. Saw them in the play-offs and they are shit.

[VikingJames]

Who gives a flying shite what the bookies think anyway? They know the square root of naff all about Rovers in most cases.

There are two valid sides to the argument though. The OP is right to point out that Peterborough shouldn't really be regarded twice as good as us (especially given their disastrous spell in this division a couple of years ago, when some of these supposed \"expert predictors\" tipped them to finish in the play-off positions. Not mentioning any names though eh Chris Kamara writing in FourFourTwo Magazine's season preview in summer 2009.)

There is however a good case that we should be given shite odds of troubling the upper echelons of the division. If the season started tomorrow, we'd be doomed. Plus, given the disastrous end to last season, you can forgive bookies for casting their half-arsed views towards us being relegated.

Doesn't bother me though. We prefer being underdogs, right?

[DRFC-PERKINS]

'Everyone loves an underdog' or so they say, We were favorites to go down when we got promotion to the football league and then went on to win the league(as someone has already posted elsewhere). Our 2011 form is not good, the bookies obviously feel it will carry on, lets prove them wrong lads.

[Mr1Croft]

Who gives a flying shite what the bookies think anyway? They know the square root of naff all about Rovers in most cases.

There are two valid sides to the argument though. The OP is right to point out that Peterborough shouldn't really be regarded twice as good as us (especially given their disastrous spell in this division a couple of years ago, when some of these supposed \"expert predictors\" tipped them to finish in the play-off positions. Not mentioning any names though eh Chris Kamara writing in FourFourTwo Magazine's season preview in summer 2009.)

There is however a good case that we should be given shite odds of troubling the upper echelons of the division. If the season started tomorrow, we'd be doomed. Plus, given the disastrous end to last season, you can forgive bookies for casting their half-arsed views towards us being relegated.

Doesn't bother me though. We prefer being underdogs, right?

The odds never really bothered me, it was the fact that peterbrogough had odds almost half of ours.

As for the top three/top of tree, I did misread it, oops  I thought there was something dodgey about it.

The point I was getting at over the mid-table comment was with us bieng the least faviourite to win the title, the bookies obviously think we are going to not just go down, but fade away quickly and finish at the foot of the table...