Blackburn Rovers officially award honour caps to former Manchester United duo

Blackburn Rovers approach the closing weeks of a 2025/26 campaign that has, by any honest measure, been a difficult one. An eighth consecutive Championship season, sitting in 19th in the table.

Valerien Ismael left by mutual consent in early February, replaced days later by Michael O’Neill on a short-term deal, the Northern Ireland manager taking on the Ewood Park job as a dual appointment.

For a club of Rovers’ stature, it is not the season anyone in Blackburn wanted. But the campaign carries weight beyond the league table as this season marks the club’s 150th anniversary.

Rovers were founded in 1875, predating most of the clubs they now share a division with, and were one of the twelve founding members of the Football League in 1888.

Six FA Cup wins sit in the trophy cabinet alongside two First Division titles from the early 1900s. While it is now over a decade since they last played in the Premier League, Rovers remain one of only seven English clubs to have won it.

Two separate Premier League eras, 1992 to 1999, and 2001 to 2012, tell the full story of their modern top-flight history.

It was against that context that Rovers staged their 150th Anniversary Gala Dinner, using the ceremony to induct seven new Honour Cap recipients.

Alan Shearer, Craig Short, Charlie Mulgrew, Craig Conway and goalkeeper Roger Jones made up five of the group, as well as former Red Devils Phil Jones and Benni McCarthy.

Phil Jones is an academy product at Blackburn, and Rovers’ tribute rightly points to the memorable debut he made against Chelsea at just 18 years old.

Forty senior appearances followed before Sir Alex Ferguson made his move in the summer of 2011, paying a reported £16.5 million to take one of the Premier League’s most promising young defenders to Manchester.

What followed at United was, on paper, a trophy haul most players would retire happy with.

Jones won the Premier League in 2012/13, Ferguson’s final title, and the last time United have lifted the division, before adding the FA Cup under Louis van Gaal in 2015/16 and both the EFL Cup and Europa League under José Mourinho in 2016/17. Two Community Shields sat alongside.

The numbers tell one story but on the pitch, his body told another. Jones’s United career was defined, increasingly, by a relentless cycle of injuries that kept him out of competitive football for 708 days between January 2020 and November 2021, a stretch that ended, fittingly, with a clean sheet on his return against Wolves.

He left Old Trafford on a free in 2023 after 12 years at the club and he has since returned to Blackburn in a coaching capacity.

Benni McCarthy’s recognition is rooted entirely in his playing career at Ewood Park, where he scored 52 goals in 141 appearances between 2006 and 2010 and cemented himself as a cult hero with strikes like the FA Cup winner against Arsenal.

But it is a more recent chapter of his career that ties him to United.

In July 2022, Erik ten Hag appointed the former South Africa international to Manchester United’s coaching staff as a first-team coach with a specific brief around finishing and forward play.

His most visible legacy at the club was his work with Marcus Rashford, whose 30-goal 2022-23 season, the most prolific of his career, drew widespread credit back to McCarthy’s influence on his technique and decision-making in front of goal.

McCarthy left United in the summer of 2024 when his contract was not renewed.

Now the pair go down in Blackburn Rovers history, as well as having made their mark at Old Trafford.