Bolton were beaten for the first time at home this season as they went down to a 2-0 defeat against Rotherham United yesterday.
Ian Evatt might have been stretching it over his praise of our performance, but there was an argument that he sort of had a point. We dominated possession, and had far more chances than Rotherham. We’ve had 42 shots in our last two home games now, and while we’ve had two goals in those disallowed, the Burton one being simply wrongly so, ultimately, we haven’t scored. That really shoots down the ‘we keep trying to walk it in, have a shot’ argument. On another day Eoin Doyle might have taken that chance he had, but we need to be better against teams who defend well. Burton, Cambridge and now Rotherham have shown that. Dapo Afolayan was kept fairly quiet too, which won’t always happen but it does massively impact us if he can’t get into the game. If and when we get Amadou Bakayoko and Xavier Amaechi back, that will at least give us a couple more options to change things up when it’s not working.
At the other end, the two goals were fairly avoidable too, but there were some decent performances. Josh Sheehan was as classy as ever, and might have had a goal. Gethin Jones did rather well and Ricardo Santos was alright, but ultimately Rotherham took their chances and came away with the three points.
Which leads us to the attendance. Over 20,000 for ‘Family Day’ but as is all too common on these occasions, we slash the ticket prices, get a bumper crowd in, and promptly go on to lose. Typical Bolton…