A fan's-eye view from Ewood Park, with Phil Lloyd

CONVENTIONALLY, Hell is portrayed as a hot place, all fire and brimstone. Strange then, to find that hell on earth is freezing cold and located about 60 miles south of here.

Port Vale are building quite a smart, though oddly unfinished, edifice to disguise the entrance to this Underworld that Rovers fans stumbled across on Saturday, more than one admitting to having had 'a devil of a job' trying to find it!

A blackening sky, a biting wind and a pudding pitch did not augur well for anyone hoping for Rovers to follow up victory at The Valley by vanquishing The Vale.

The modern equivalent of Cerberus, the locals guarding this entrance to Hades, had clearly seen it all before. Some just stayed warm at home while others huddled in small groups in the stands, baying at the match officials in a vain attempt to generate some heat.

It received scant attention in the match reports but the players 'warm up', first in driving hail then snow swept across the barren wastes of Burslem were an exercise in utter futility. As for the match itself, at best it was purgatory for the shivering spectators. My daughter progressively lost contact with her toes, one by one, during a first half of mind and foot-numbing torpor. I could be mistaken but I'm sure that one fellow sufferer, edging past me in early search of lukewarm liquid, said (Captain Oates-like), 'I may be gone some time'.

Mid-August and the false dawn of the new season now seem so far away, but did we ever really dream of 'doing a Sunderland'? Back then, on a day when a scarf was an optional extra and a woolly hat a certifiable offence, those same Port Vale spoilers came to bring a bitter, chilling reality to the Ewood terraces. Nil-nil then, and nil-nil now.

The facts speak for themselves - which is more than most of the Rovers fans, chilled to the marrow, could do by the time the ref mercifully brought an end to our nightmare excursion to the nether world.

It's hard to draw a sensible conclusion from a game like that, except that we'll have to play one helluva lot better against Bolton in tonight's derby!

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.