FIFTEEN months ago, when Blackburn Rovers improbably seized the Premiership title, the town's supporters bridled at the suggestion that theirs was the ultimate one man club.

Yesterday, in between the showers of a suitably drab, midsummer's day gone wrong, those same supporters spoke with one faltering voice to back up that original theory: the hero had gone.

North Lancashire's big secret was out: Alan Shearer had taken his paying in book and ambition back to his native northeast, and in so doing had ripped the heart out of a club which for tour seasons had been sustained by his brilliance.

Supporters invariably gravitate towards their club's stadium in times of distress. It is accepted practice.

Yesterday the word had spread so quickly and with such weighty authority that within 10 minutes of the formal announcement the first of many began to gather outside Ewood Park.

Wearing their blue and white they stood around solemnly, almost as if they expected something to happen. What they wanted, of course, was for Blackburn chairman Robert Coar to emerge, all smiles, to proclaim it was all a big mistake, a hoax.

But Coar was in his bunker dictating a press release, one which opened with the dreaded words: "I can confirm . . ."

"Have you heard?" they inquired of all and sundry.

"That's us just about finished - totally buggered," said Stephen Dempsey (32), a fitter from nearby Rishton. "Whether we like it or not, Alan Shearer was Blackburn Rovers, and now we have lost him we may have lost everything. Last season, when things were really bad and we were down near the foot of the table, Shearer was the only thing that kept us going."

Others were no quite so restrained. The withdrawal from the Blackburn club shop of number nine shirts bearing Shearer's name may have been swift and discreet; but it was a covert operation which came too late for some.

"It's no use to anyone now," one fan said. "I think it's disgusting that shirts with Shearer's name on them were still being sold late last week. By that point, they must have known he wasn't going to be here next season."

He had already renewed his season ticket, but many thousands of more sceptical supporters have not. Now it seems unlikely that they will.

Last season, when Shearer was banging in the goals with mesmerising efficiency, Ewood Park was quite often only three quarters full. That sort of attendance may well come to represent a bumper gate in the post Shearer era.

"We have had a woman on air crying and another, a mechanic, has downed tools to visit the club ticket office to try and get a refund on his season's ticket," said a BBC Radio Lancashire spokesman.

Before Shearer, Blackburn was, perhaps, most famous for a curious line in the 1967 people's classic, A Day In The Life. "Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire," sang John Lennon wistfully. Well, there are 4001 now. And some holes are harder to fill than others.