Everything Richie Wellens said about THAT photo of Omar Bogle and Ed Williams

The out of favour duo are understood to be training independently, away from the first team group, after Rovers failed to move them on in the summer transfer window.

Bogle uploaded a photograph of himself and Williams at Cantley Park captioned ‘Good day at the office with my boy @_edcwilliams #Exiled’ – before quickly deleting it from his account.

Rovers fans screengrabbed the picture and it proved to be a big talking point on social media.

Wellens told the Free Press he hadn’t seen the photograph.

He said: "We’ve made them available for transfer, which is football.

"There’s bigger managers than me that have said to players they can leave.

"And there’s certainly better players than Omar Bogle and Ed Williams that have been told they can find other clubs.

"Why are we making a big deal out of it? I find it amazing. Okay, it’s not quite worked out.

"By the way, if I wasn’t picking players who had scored a ratio of one in two, or scored goals, then if you want to throw any abuse my way for not picking players who score goals then I’ll take it.

"But these players are earning substantial amounts of money for where our wage bill sits and they’ve not scored the goals in the last 40 to 50 games that warrant that kind of money.

"We wanted to free up some money. The chairman and Gavin [Baldwin] have been fantastic in allowing us to go over budget to get Joe Dodoo in but that was still within the vision of obviously getting those funds back for Omar and Ed.

"But I don’t think we should make a big deal out of it. It is just football. It’s nothing personal.

"Exiled is a very strong word. They’re still here training. Ed’s played at Walsall, he’s played at Stoke. They train every day so I watch them train. They’re not exiled. It’s not like I’ve come in and gone ‘I never want to watch you play football again and you’re done’. I watch them every day in training. I’ve watched them play at Walsall and Stoke away. I’ve watched Omar play at Harrogate.”

Bogle has scored two goals in 21 appearances for Rovers since joining from Charlton in January.

He missed a penalty in the defeat at Sheffield Wednesday and hasn’t featured since coming on as a second substitute in the 1-0 reverse at Accrington on August 17.

Williams has not made a single league start for Rovers since arriving in the summer of 2020. He has made 20 appearances in total.