Jensen to the rescue

"Platini - pure Platini!" the Frenchman enthused, drawing comparisons with his fellow countryman and personal hero - one of the game's all-time greats - as he drooled over the quality of the free kick that saved Wanderers' blushes at the Reebok yesterday.

A third successive home defeat was looming when the young Dane produced a touch of magic to salvage a point that, although far from satisfactory, managed to check a slide that was threatening to undermine confidence on and off the field.

Sliced sweetly with his right instep from less than a yard outside the penalty box, the ball rose swiftly to clear the defensive wall then dipped and curled, dropping just under the crossbar for a goal any set-piece specialist in the world would have been proud of.

And no-one was more relieved or surprised to see it go in than Bob Taylor, the one-time idol of the Albion fans, who'd worked his socks off to get the better of his old team-mates. He thought Jensen should have gone for power rather than precision.

"I told Claus he was too close to get the ball up and down over the wall," Taylor confessed today. "I told him he'd be better off blasting it. Thank goodness he ignored the advice.

"He's been trying free kicks like that all season but they've been going all over the place. This was something special though - Alan Miller just didn't move, he was rooted to the ground."

Had Taylor made more of a chance that fell his way three minutes later, Wanderers would have claimed all three points - and deservedly so after showing the character and resilience to fight back after going behind to a Daryl Burgess header.

But, on the strength of their first half performance, they can thank their lucky stars they were playing a team more bereft of form and confidence than themselves!

The Baggies certainly had the lion's share of possession in the first 45 but they did nothing with it and it was ironic that the Burgess header on 58 minutes - the Albion skipper got above everyone to convert James Quinn's free kick - came as Wanderers were enjoying their best spell of them game, passing, pressing and creating chances.

Not surprisingly it was a frustrated Sam Allardyce who emerged from the dressing room to take a swipe at his own defenders for committing the "ultimate sin" of being caught out by a straightforward set-piece and to lead the tributes to Jensen's magic.

"There was nothing they could have done about Claus's free kick," the manager suggested. "It should have won us the game instead of just getting us back into it.

"It didn't really look like West Brom were ever going to score but we switched off and conceded a goal from a set-play, which should have been dealt with quite easily, and we end up scraping a draw."

On the back of successive league defeats by Tranmere, Blackburn and Stockport, the result was further evidence that there is much work to be done if Wanderers are to re-establish themselves among the leading lights of a very ordinary division. Albion came to the Reebok without a win in eight games and having picked up just on point from their previous seven away trips.

But they did enough in a cheerless first half to send the Bolton players back to the dressing room at half time to a hard-hitting chorus of boos from their own disillusioned fans.

Miller had actually been the busier of the two keepers, saving well from Gareth Farrelly and Eidur Gudjohnsen but Wanderers looked just what they are - a team in transition, repeatedly being chopped and changed and with a handful of short-term recruits in stop-gap roles.

The withdrawal of Michael Johansen just before kick off, when he finally gave in to flu symptoms, didn't help matters. Jensen was switched to the right of midfield with Paul Warhurst returning after a nine-match lay-off with a damaged hamstring.

It was a comeback that was to last just 37 minutes before the injury-prone utility man trudged off with a groin problem.

That at least brought Passi into play and the 33-year-old Frenchman, who last week signed a second one-month contract did enough to prompt Allardyce to admit: "Perhaps I should have played Franck from the start because when he came on he did ever so well.

"He gave us a bit of spark. He showed how the game should be played from the defensive point of view, working very hard to close the opposition down. He put his foot in, won his headers and from the attacking point of view he played the game nice and simple, passed to a white shirt - which was something we didn't do as we should have done in the first half - and we got some flowing movement going."

Passi makes no great claims about his attacking abilities. "I am a defensive midfield player," he says unashamedly, "attacking is not really the job I do best."

But he looked handy enough when he went agonisingly close to claiming the equaliser, turning on Taylor's pass and clipping a shot against Miller's crossbar!

Wanderers had the bit between their teeth at that point with Mark Fish and Gudni Bergsson joining fellow defenders Darren Holloway and Mike Whitlow on attacking raids that piled the pressure on the Albion back four.

It was Bergsson's enthusiasm that won the free kick that brought the equaliser - an ugly challenge being duly and justifiably punished.

Albion were relieved in the end that Taylor was unable to make more of the chance Farrelly carved out so cleverly and that Gudjohnsen's glancing header from Ricardo Gardner's cross missed the target.

"If we'd had another 10 minutes we'd have won it," Taylor claimed. "But they were the better side in the first half so I suppose it was a fair result. I'm disappointed I missed the chance because it was a great ball from Gareth. I tried to knock the ball over the keeper but I'm not sure what happened after that."

Allardyce wasn't bemoaning missed chances, though, as he assessed the situation that laves him with a haul of just three points from the last six games.

"We've got to get back into clean sheet mode," he insisted, "It's the 1-0s that count and if players had been in the right starting positions on their free kick, we'd have dealt with it and Claus's goal would have earned us all three points."

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