Remember March 2003 lads. They don’t like it up them.
Afternoon all. What do you mean haven’t you already been here today? Is two articles in a day one too many for you? Not man enough? You need to bulk up son.
There’s a big match taking place tonight, but you don’t want to hear about my FA Trophy Final on FM12. You’d much rather hear about Bolton Wanderers things rather than about my made up team made up of all my former Sunday League teammates powering through the leagues.
We’re good though. We’re really good.
The club tweeted some images today of training in progress at Euxton and it was good to see two or three faces that haven’t been seen before. There was Paul Robinson, returned from his loan spell at Leeds, probably standing on Darren Pratley’s leg (Pratley just out of shot). There was LCY, going in for a tackle on….isn’t that Tuncay? Shouldn’t he be having a hissy fit in Germany?
I suppose it could have been superimposed and that LCY was actually going in for a tackle with some faceless junior and they just put Tuncay in to disprove those rumours. At least there are no photos of Robbie Blake, so Sunnyside Retirement Home are still up one resident.
(‘I’m Robbie Blake. I’m a professional footballer.’ ‘Yes yes, Mr Blake. Now just take these pills and we’ll go for spin round the garden on your zimmer frame.’)
Hopefully they’ll put the TV on in the rest room for Grandad so that he can watch the game on Wednesday, although they’ll have to get a dodgy satellite feed to do it. There are lots of positive voices coming out of the club, as there should be having got five points from nine/five points from twelve/fourteen points from twenty four. If you dig out an old programme from six years ago, you’d see in the manager’s notes that Big Sam used to ask us to ‘raise the roof’ on match days. Now, St Owen has taken this mantra;
‘If we get the backing at home that we do away from home and get all that vocal energy together instead of being split between the three stands, get the same unity we get away, it will make it a real tough night for Spurs.‘
I remember even further back a game against Spurs when you could hardly hear your own voice in the cacophony of T’Reebok before Jay Jay scored an injury time penalty. We needed a result then to lift us out of the relegation zone and we need the same again on Wednesday. That game is proof enough that the crowd at Bolton can be intimidating if we want to be. To my mind it was the very will of the fans that gained that result, spuring the players on. More of the same on Wednesday would be good.
OC is still waiting on the fitness of Reo-Coker so we are again looking at Josh Vela starting. At least this time he will have had some game time but he would be an unknown quantity for Van der Vaart and his chums. Tottenham are in a funny position, scrambling for points to try and ensure Champions League football but in the back of their minds they may be thinking that their loss of form has had something to do with Honest Harry not getting the England manager’s job. There is also the history of them never having won a league game at T’Reebok and a weight of expectation every time they come to Bolton that they are going to get something.
That has always been Tottenham’s downfall, thinking that they are bigger than they actually are, that they deserve to be in the top part of the league on name alone. Nothing could be further from the truth. You deserve to be where you end up at the end of the season and if they fail to qualify for the Champions League they will deserve it as much as we will if we are relegated.
Don’t get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for Tottenham for what happened after Fab’s collapse but a win on Wednesday for Bolton will make the former less likely to happen and an apparent appearance by Muamba on the pitch before the game could be just the fillip that the players need. It also gives him a chance to thank the fans, both Bolton and Spurs, for their support after his collapse. It would be great to see him and, naturally, he will be there for my final home game of the season. And I’m sure that the Bolton players will put on a performance on that fact alone.
What happened over the weekend, barring Wigan’s result over Newcastle, has helped us greatly, although St Owen’s assertion that our destiny was still in our hands BEFORE QPR’s defeat may have been mathematically poor. There can be no doubt that a win on Wednesday would put massive pressure on Mark Hughes and his team of overpaid mercenaries to get a result against Stoke whilst we knock two or three past the new England manager.
I think I need some of Robbie Blake’s pills.
We will return tomorrow with more guff. Will you join us. Say you’ll be there.
You can follow your writer Mr X on Twitter @QuentinX