SAM Allardyce fears El-Hadji Diouf’s ‘bad-boy’ image will live with him forever after jumping to his defence in the wake of the weekend’s ‘goalkeeper gate’.

Diouf has been pilloried by the critics after being seen to impede Fulham stopper Mark Schwarzer in the build up to Chris Samba’s opener but Allardyce insists the finger of blame should be pointed at referee Anthony Taylor.

The Rovers boss accepts Diouf did foul the Australian but believes it attracted undue attention, especially in light of several other refereeing blunders throughout the clash.

“Has nobody ever fouled a goalkeeper before?”, Allardyce said.

“All this over publicising of a foul on a goalkeeper that happens every single week in a game of football, for some reason, probably because it is El-Hadji, people make rather unfortunate sarcastic comments.

“He leaves himself open to do that to be honest with you, but at the end of the day he is our in-form player. The blame unfortunately lies, not with El-Hadji Diouf, but with the referee.

"He hasn't caused any problems for a long long time, but once you are labelled with it you can't shift it, unfortunately that is something you have to live with."

"The bottom line is the referee missed a blatant handball from Mark Schwarzer and that would have cured all the problems that happened throughout the game and we'd be sat here with three points.

“Because Diouf is bigger news people choose to write about that rather than other incidents. We feel hard done to by what has happened.”