Blackburn 3, Wolves 0: Bill Howell's big match verdict
Dec 6 2010 by Paul Castles, Birmingham Mail
THE day Wolves last won a top flight game at Blackburn a submarine was sinking to the very bottom of the ocean.
Down, down, down it went. Down to the bottom, down to the very bottom of the ocean.
Undersea Belgian explorer Jacques Piccard and Navy pal Don Walsh descended in their US Navy vessel Trieste into the deepest depths, reaching the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, a depth of more than seven miles.
They observed a flat fish and a new type of shrimp, proving that some vertebrates can withstand extreme pressures.
It was January 1960. And at Ewood Park Matt Woods was sticking a pigs’ bladder into his own goal as Wolves kept the pressure on early pace-setters Spurs and Burnley at the top of the First Division.
Fast forward 50 years and different vertebrates are sinking under very different pressures.
They’re not fish but they’re flat- footed.
They’re centre-halves and they play in gold and black.
And down and down sinks the ship, down and down towards the Championship, leaking goals.
Twenty-five miles down the road from Blackburn, a train will tonight crash into the fictional streets of Weatherfield, leaving a trail of devastation everywhere. Veterans will lie stricken on the rubble.
That’s just how Mick McCarthy must have been feeling at 5pm on Saturday night.
With his veteran commander Jody Craddock currently as poleaxed as Ken Barlow lying prostrate on the cobbles, Wolves have come off the rails.
They started like a train at Ewood – and not a two-bob London Midland shuttling through Worcestershire stopping every 20 seconds. No, this was a sleek Virgin Pendolino, tilting through corners and hurtling through the regional stations at breakneck speed.
