Blackburn Rovers’s Easter Monday Championship match at home to Millwall has been moved by the Football League to help ease the club’s fixture congestion before the FA Cup quarter-final replay with Liverpool two days later on 8 April.
Gary Bowyer’s team travel to Leeds United on Easter Saturday so faced having to play Millwall 48 hours later before the chance to reach a Wembley semi-final by knocking out Liverpool on the Wednesday, which would have been a third game in five days.
A new date for the Millwall game has yet to be arranged.
Blackburn forced the replay by drawing 0-0 at Anfield on Sunday, with Martin Skrtel suffering a head injury after only two minutes. The Liverpool defender went to hospital as a precaution after receiving eight minutes of treatment on the pitch.
The injury happened after an aerial challenge with Blackburn’s Rudy Gestede that ended with Skrtel falling awkwardly. Gestede, a 26-year-old Benin striker who caused Liverpool problems, particularly before the break, claimed the challenge had been “naughty.”
He said: “It was a naughty challenge in the air but when he landed on the floor he was unconscious for a while. I called the medical team straight away. His eyes weren’t there, he was lost. But I asked [Adam] Lallana at half-time how Skrtel was and he said he was fine – everything was checked and he was OK. Hopefully he’ll recover very well and be ready for the next game.
“It was a tough battle but you want to see how you do against the best. Hopefully at home we will beat them and I’ll score. It was a big performance from us. They’ve got some class players but we managed to get the draw. Everybody was fighting for each other.
“We want to play at Wembley now, we are so close we cannot believe it but we have the replay to play. It’s still on and we have the chance to play at home, so it’s going to be a different game at home on a different pitch. Wembley is still there so we fight for this.”
Blackburn dominated the first half and the Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers expressed relief his team are still in the hat for semi-final draw, which is after Monday evening’s last quarter-final at Old Trafford between Manchester United and Arsenal.
