Coppell Veers From Official Line

At half-time the referee would have been thanked if he had put his watch forward an hour and blown the final whistle. By the end Mark Clattenburg might have wished he had or perhaps that he could put it back. Even Steve Coppell was moved.

"He was two referees," said Reading's manager in rare effusion. "In the first half he was laid back, in the second a terror." Nine names were taken, two of them Marek Matejovsky in a dozen minutes. Five went to Blackburn, statistically the foulest side in the league. "I didn't think the game merited so many," said Mark Hughes.

Maybe Clattenburg was trying to liven things up. "The first half matched the weather [wet], the second was more fiery," said Coppell. Hughes called the performances of both sides "flat". Players hung about, going nowhere. Communication was poor. It might have been Terminal 5.

All of which belied the need for points. Reading, despite three wins from their previous four games, are still not safe. Rovers have sights on the Intertoto route to Europe, which means finishing above Aston Villa and Manchester City. Hughes could not explain why "our timing was out of sorts". It was the odder as the last two games between the clubs had produced six goals each and Reading had not known a goalless draw in 30. But statistics are notorious signposts. Another was brought to the fore two minutes after the red card.

Reading run the third best offside trap in the league. Moving slickly up at a free-kick slickly taken, they left five Rovers offside, the three in front of goal by a yard. The linesman saw it otherwise - or not at all - and Zurab Khizanishvili was allowed a diving, point-blank header. Fortunately Marcus Hahnemann played to the whistle and parried the bullet away.

"There would have been a minor revolt if they had scored," said Coppell. "It's only human. If you see an injustice, you stand up to it." He was thinking beyond his players when, talking relegation, he added: "There are so many jobs at stake here." Clattenburg was lucky not to have met an army of mop-handed cleaners.

Nicky Shorey, looking forward to his tussle with David Bentley, said: "I like a thinking kind of match." No one did enough of it here but Clattenburg - "a top official", as Coppell remembered himself - might like to try a bit before his next appearance.