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

RARELY can a football match have been so like a jacket potato.

The spuds we were served at a hostelry just a couple of John Filan clearances away from the West Brom ground were lacking one vital quality - heat - and were duly sent back.

90 minutes or so later, what Rovers served up to their travelling supporters at The Hawthorns was similarly cold, dispiriting and worthy only of a sharp rebuke to the kitchen. Like the goalmouth at the away end of the stadium, Rovers in the first half were, frankly, a load of windswept rubbish.

A bit of microwaving and suddenly everything became more palatable - as in the pub, so at the game. Whatever the management team said at half-time warmed up the players so that they were, thankfully, a much different proposition in the second half. But there's another story here because I happen to believe the fans played a big part in the transformation of the men in yellow.

I'm not normally a subscriber to the view that fans can be as valuable as an extra player on the pitch (though at Old Trafford, they do equate to an extra referee-intimidator!). But right from the restart and without publicly forming a huddle first, the Rovers fans stepped up their vocal support and visibly lifted their team. It was great off-field performance. Confidence is slowly returning and nowhere is that better seen than in Matt Jansen. An anonymous figure in earlier games, his goals at Portsmouth and West Brom have brought back that swagger, that willingness to run at and unnerve defenders which so excited us when he first arrived.

But yet again, we ended up talking about the man (for want of a better word) in the black. Clearly, Ashley Ward requires extra training to perfect his 'falling over in the box' routine because, just as he failed to convince Gary Willard at Charlton in May that he had been assaulted en route to a certain goal, so Clive Wilkes turned one of his blind eyes to a definite penalty on Saturday.

As my friend Bob (a referee assessor) remarked, Mr Wilkes really ought to have stuck to Emmerdale!

After that incident, any Rovers fan could have told you how the end was scripted. Like the cheese on my belatedly warmed-up jacket potato, the prospect of two extra points just melted away before our eyes.

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