Chasing Premier League promotion, Blackburn Rovers are a success story after a decade of humiliation

This week, Blackburn Rovers suffered their first league defeat in almost three months. Wednesday’s 2-0 loss at Hull City denied them the chance to climb into the automatic promotion positions at the top of the EFL Championship and move a step closer to a return to the Premier League. It was a setback, but only of the kind that every other normal football club has to suffer from time to time.

For too long, Blackburn were anything but a normal football club; defeat at Hull on a cold night in January without the prospect of the manager being fired, or the supporters staging a protest against the owners, is a genuine sign of progress. Blackburn famously won the Premier League title in 1995 after being bankrolled to success by Jack Walker, the boyhood fan who became a multi-millionaire and then outspent Manchester United, delivering glory to a small-town club that had fallen on hard times.

Those were the good days. Since the Walker family sold the club in 2010 to the Rao family — the owners of Venkateshwara Hatcheries, an Indian conglomerate of businesses related to the poultry industry, better known as Venky’s — Blackburn Rovers have, at times, been a laughing stock and an example of how a football club should not be run.

They have sacked managers at an alarming rate, engaged in highly publicised, unsuccessful pursuits of some of the biggest names in football and become a lightning rod for supporter protests that have ranged from abusive to farcical. In Dec. 2010, local police confirmed that two chickens — one dressed in a Blackburn scarf — were held in the cells at the club’s Ewood Park ground after being released on the pitch in a protest against Venky’s, but as the months and years passed, the anger of supporters became more direct, with fans hitting members of the Rao family with snowballs during a visit to a game in January 2013.

But Wednesday’s defeat at Hull was an example of how the chaos at Blackburn has been replaced by calm. Rovers are still owned…