Blackburn 3, Wolves 1: Elokobi and Zubar sleep in on a bad day at the office
TO BE FAIR to room-mates George Elokobi and Ronald Zubar, Saturday afternoon’s TV schedule was not one to miss.
For instance, at 12.40pm – when the pair should have been arriving for the final team talk at the team hotel – you could catch the last five minutes of Friends on Channel 4, the one where, as a favour to Ross, Monica and Phoebe pick up Emily’s wedding dress.
Over on BBC2, Danny was starting his first week at university “looking forward to fun, parties and girls”, in Off the Hook.
On ITV1, Chris Tarrant was hosting a repeat showing of a special edition of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, featuring Steve Rider and Andy Townsend, no less.
So it’s easy to see why the Cameroonian and the Frenchman dozed and missed the gathering.
Whatever their reasoning for missing Mick McCarthy’s mutterings, it set the tone for a bad day at the office.
David Dunn and former Wolves striker Jason Roberts were simply too good for a Wolves defence who spent most of the afternoon chasing shadows.
A rather smug-looking Sam Allardyce clearly felt Rovers should have romped it – “excellent”, “comfortable” and “quality” were just three of his post-match adjectives.
McCarthy could have used “shoddy”, “sloppy”, “sleepy”. He could easily have found himself describing a very different set of dwarves.
There was no Snow White, though, only the two Sleeping Beauties locked away in their room.
Talking of sleeping, there was nothing beautiful in Blackburn’s opener. If Elokobi and Zubar set the tone for the day, then Karl Henry carried it forth.
Richard Stearman rolled the ball back inside to Henry on the centre spot but, under pressure from El-Hadji Diouf, he played a lazy sidefoot backwards which gave Michael Mancienne little hope.
