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

IT'S one of life's great mysteries: What on earth do assistant referees do?

Each week brings new examples of incompetence from the flag-wavers who, I naively thought, might be there to orchestrate the entertainment that we go to watch.

Don't assistant referees adjudicate on line decisions?

No - having marred the Villa game by causing their goalkeeper to be sent off, they later admit that they failed to call correctly an incident no more than 25 yards in front of their eyes.

Don't assistant referees spot off the ball incidents unseen by the referee?

No - either they let their imagination run riot (as with last month's penalty at Forest) or, like Arsene Wenger, they become suddenly unsighted when an Arsenal player poleaxes an opponent.

Don't assistant referees make offside decisions?

Again, no - they spend 90 minutes infuriating supporters by choosing to ignore players patently infringing the offside law, or alternatively wave their infernal flags anything up to 10 seconds after the offside incident occurs. Are these people specially selected for the slowness of their reactions? Or is the delay so they can toss a coin to determine the 50 per cent of incidents that neither they nor their guide dog manage to spot? Add to this their sheer inability to identify aerial fouls, shirt pulling, foul throws, etc and you have the only plausible answer.

The sole purpose of an assistant referee is to be an active member of the trio forming football's equivalent of a pantomime horse!

They are there solely to attract the scorn and derision of the paying public, who know that they wear invisible blindfolds and who thus shout out "He's in front of you" - or worse. They also serve to whip up a frenzy of frustration and outrage among some spectators, creating what is known in football parlance as "atmosphere" at the game.

Which brings me to my point. The antics of the three "officials" at the Leeds match stirred the passions of Rovers fans to new heights.

This crescendo of noise helped inspire the team (especially the excellent Filan, Broomes and Wilcox) to play like men possessed. And we hung on to win and all went home hoarse, feeling elated.

Good entertainment? Maybe. It's just that I actually paid to see us play Leeds in a fair and even contest. And that script got torn up after just 25 minutes.

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