You didn’t ask. We answer anyway.
Morning all. Nothing much happened today. Jay Spearing didn’t join. No one left. No one was fired. Pretty mundane stuff.
So, let’s go back to yesterday and a couple of comments that I’d like to reply to. Call it a mini Q&A, like they do on Twitter but with a longer answer.
As a non native Bolton fan, I am in a select band of people who follow the club without being born there and with no familial ties. I’m sure I’m not unique in this. If you don’t know the story, may I point you in the direction of this article and its sequel. But you should by now, I’ve been pointing to them long enough. So, although when a voice comes on a national radio phone in and says it supports Stretford or the Scousers but sounds like it hasn’t been any further north than Tottenham I say to Mrs X ‘Sounds local’, I kind of sympathise with them. Although they are, obviously, a bandwagon glory hunter. That’s the difference between us.
Last summer, when I wrote that article about that thing but not on here on another site, as I was living in Liverpool at the time, the person who the article was about made out that living in Liverpool meant that you couldn’t have a valid viewpoint about Bolton Wanderers. Which was, quite frankly, a load of old bollocks. Someone even sent a picture of a fat woman in a Liverpool shirt. I expect it was of his mother. Some people can be so parochial.
Anyway, the point is that it doesn’t matter where you come from, you can support whichever team you like, with or without a valid reason. Players who play for the club for a long time, like SKD or Jussi, are held up as honorary Boltonians because the play for the club for ten years or so. Some of us have been supporting the club since those players were in nappies.
So, along the same line, does not having actually been to a game make your viewpoint about the game any less valid? So, when mickbwfc said after yesterday’s article….
‘Like you said you didn’t watch the match against Forest and to anyone without a negative, clouded mind it was a good performance by Bolton.’
…it made me sit up. Not the bit about the negative, clouded mind, although the general conscensus, even amongst the majority of the pro-OC brigade is that we were poor in the first thirty minutes. It was the inference that because I wasn’t there, my opinion meant less.
As you’ll know, I lived in London for a while and the nature of my job, even now, means that I don’t get to see some games, be it live, on the television or on some stream bounced off twelve satellites. When I lived in London it was worse, as I got to see Bolton only when they came to the smoke. However, by the miracle of modern technology, you can keep up with the game. If you have a good imagination, which I do, you can pretty much tell what is going on at a game. There will be tweets going on from the ground, usually from both national and local press and also from fans, both home and away. A picture will be built up that enables you, even if you cannot physically see the game, to have a good idea of what has gone on. Then you will see highlights of it later.
And then you write a report. It’s all pretty simple. And it makes your opinion no less valid for it.
So, yah, boo and sucks.
6am edit. I would like to thank Azreal88 at the BWFC Forum for giving me some food for thought after we went back and forward in the early hours about the merits of this first part of the piece. You will find it here. Now, I don’t usually admit that I’m wrong (except to my wife) but I can now see that, whilst you may have a good idea of what is going on at a game, you may not be able to see the full picture that a person who is actually at the game can see. They may be wrong and you may be right (and I know in my heart of hearts that we were rubbish early on against Forest) but there is nothing like seeing it live. I am now going off for a cry.
Back of the Net writes:
‘Quentin – you say that you aren’t calling for his head but your article doesn’t read that way and really why shouldn’t it?’
I think I’ve always tried to give the pros and cons of the problems that the manager faces and I’ve never actually called for his removal. Nor will I ever. However, I am not blind to the fact that the groundswell of anti OC sentiment is growing. Most of the time, I don’t follow article comments up, unless I have made a factual error. But I have noticed that aussie mike has been joined by more people recently. I didn’t attempt to write an article calling for his head. The point I was trying to make was that the point when a decision has to be made may come sooner than the ten game limit people were talking about last night.
By the same token, there is nothing to say that we won’t win at Hull and find ourselves in the top ten. I understand that people may find this fanciful, and I am aware that people may think that this is ‘papering over the cracks’, but football is a results business. If we win, then it goes some way to OC keeping a foothold, and also gives players confidence.
However, lose and we start having a problem. Continue to fail to win and then you find yourself struggling to even make the play offs and, even worse, at the wrong end of the table. People should modify their cut off point based on the results, not on the calendar. If we lose five straight, do you really give him two more to get it right?
I haven’t got the answer as to who you replace him with. Taking a manager from another club will cost money, whereas viable out of work candidates range from Alan Curbishley (who wouldn’t come anyway, even if he was wanted) and Mick McCarthy (who would want to bring his own players). But if you go on the run above, you can’t really stick with a manager who would by that time have taken you to the bottom of the Championship.
Thank God that’s just hypothetical