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

UNLIKE other columnists I could mention, I don't really want to have the Lancashire Evening Telegraph sports desk inundated by fans of opposing clubs that I have annoyed, so let me put it this way: Stockport weren't very good, were they?

Yet to listen to the post-match interviews and calls to the phone-in programmes on Saturday, either I saw a different match, or I'm applying much higher standards to what I expect from my football team.

Maybe after the depressing Kidd-glove days, other fans are satisfied with any kind of performance by the players. Maybe I'm asking for too much that we should rip to pieces such a threadbare, ragged outfit as County were at the weekend. Maybe we were saving our energies for valiant deeds tonight at the Valley.

I hope so, because better performances by several individuals (Dailly, McAteer and Duff in particular) under TP haven't yet translated, in my eyes, into a convincing team output while the likes of Ashley Ward and Darren Peacock seem to be playing in lead boots wearing blindfolds.

Meanwhile the managerial saga meanders on, less of a 'Whodunnit' and more of a 'Who wants to do it?' In fact, I'm beginning to think that whoever is writing the plot of this mystery is something of an Agatha Christie, because no sooner has a prime suspect been identified (Taylor, Bassett) than they are ruled out of the reckoning. Others (Souness, O'Neill) may or may not be on the wanted list, but we are given precious little information about them and are tempted to discount them as prime suspects.

At the same time, characters from a previous thriller (Dalglish, Harford) make a surprise appearance to confuse those trying to second-guess the identity of the man who we hope will kill off the prophets of Rovers doom.

I'm not sure our novelist is sufficiently devious, but I'd like to think that some of the early candidates for arrest were simply a smokescreen to buy time, while the real target is hunted down successfully.

I don't know too many Rovers fans who would have viewed the capture of Taylor or Bassett as the solution to the crime that has occurred at Ewood Park. But who will it be?

Let's hope we can get to the final chapter before much longer!

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