“It’s great to be back and it does feel like I’ve gone full-circle,” he said. “It certainly felt like I had unfinished business here. I was only here for one season, but it was a great season – top six in the Premier League, playing in Europe, semi-final of the FA Cup – and I thoroughly enjoyed my time here, so I always felt like I had a good affinity with the club and it feels great to be back.

“There’s still some familiar faces from 15 years ago and it’s still got that same family feel and a healthy culture to it. The club have made some great senior appointments, with Jon (Dahl Tomasson) and Gregg (Broughton), and there’s some really good structure and foundations here, which will hopefully enable us to kick on and get back to where we all want to be.

“Back then, I was a one-man band, so I would cover pre-match, live, post-match, training and any individual player analysis that I had time to prepare for all on my own. The main evolution over the last 15 years is the man power and the depth of detail clubs can go into now. There’s now multiple roles and focused roles within every club, where each of the different aspects of analysis can be covered and delivered to support the coaching staff and the rest of the performance team.

“Jon puts huge demands on us, as he does with all staff, but he also puts a lot more demand on the players as well, which is something I really like. There’s a lot of ownership put on the players. We do a lot of player-led analysis, they do a lot of feedback and peer-to-peer sessions, where the players will sit down individually or in pairs with an analyst, review a game or review training, and then feed back to the rest of the team.

“Jon wants the right messages and principles to be put across, but it’s very much the players who are driving those sessions, with our support. And I’ve always been a big believer that a player-led culture creates the best learning and the best decision-making, and when you do things peer-to-peer is when you get the best retention of information.

“So it’s not about us barking orders and saying what the principles are, it’s do they understand it, can they articulate it and have they got it in their minds when they’re trying to make snap decisions on the pitch? And I think the approach that Jon and everyone here tries to adopt really maximises that.”

Adam is ably assisted in the department by Liam Holt and Ollie Slater, who have both impressed and progressed through the Rovers ranks over recent years.

Whilst studying a coaching course at UCLan, Liam gained his first experience within analysis during an internship at Blackpool’s Academy, which then led to a season working with their first team. After finishing his degree and starting his Masters, Liam spent six months working at Manchester City, assisting their Under-23s analyst, before being offered a job at Rovers’ Academy in 2019. He has since worked his way up from Under-18s to Under-23s and has been working with the first team since November 2021.

The team behind the team!