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Bolton Wanderers: One Game?

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Some said give him ten games. Time’s almost up.

Afternoon all. It was an interesting evening last night, watching two of the world’s richest clubs battle it out whilst keeping tabs on two smaller clubs battle it out for mid table supremacy in the Championship. Time was that we almost, almost, found ourselves in that vaulted company. Fifteenth place in the second division seems a long, long, way away from there now.

Here are a few things that I gathered from last night’s game. Jack Butland shouldn’t be playing in the Championship. Neither should Zat Knight (I’m not falling for this whole one of our best players this season shenanigans). Martin Petrov has been sighted. Marvin Sordell hasn’t. Someone needs to put a rocket up Benik Afobe’s arse. Leroy Lita, who would have thought? Marlon King is a reprehensible human being, and was so before he scored. Having the majority of possession and the most shots doesn’t necessarily a win make. We need some loans in (we are now halfway through September and I haven’t had a whiff of one). Half time team talk, yeah, yeah, yeah. Chris Eagles has been head and shoulders above most this season and did himself no damage last night. Jay Spearing did. OC says the least we deserved was a draw and, whilst this may be so, we didn’t get one. And when history is written, it is the results that are seen, not the performances.

OC is in a hole, and one of his own making. It doesn’t matter if he couldn’t have done anything differently last night, although there are some who may argue that seeing what someone other than Mark Davies could do in the middle might be an idea. The point is that he has the past year and a half weighing his good name down. I said a couple of weeks ago that giving him ten games and seeing where he was at was the general idea. And it is a good idea. But that number could and should go down (or up) depending on the results. It’s all very well playing well and losing, just as it’s great playing badly and winning. But Bolton Wanderers shouldn’t be fifteenth in the Championship. Hell, we shouldn’t even be in the Championship. We’re going to fall at least another place tonight and we may even fall three. Sixteenth or eighteenth? At this point, any position that has ‘-eenth’ in it is a failure.

Yes, it’s only six games. But look at those games and ask yourself if you have seen any signs of it getting better. The two games we have won were against badly performing teams, and they still created chances. Sure, we aren’t going to be playing Jack Butland every week but Birmingham’s strike force is of the type that we will meet most weeks. Meanwhile, our leading scorer plays in midfield. The next fixtures don’t give you any respite. Do you fancy going to Wednesday and getting a result after last night? Palace at home may be a banker but then we have another kind of banker coming later that week in Neil Warnock. And then the tenth game is at Millwall, a place that still brings SKD out in a cold sweat. And he played for them.

What if we lost on Saturday? Is that enough? What if we win that and then go and lose to Palace? Or, horror of horrors, lose both. That’s eight games. Isn’t that enough? Most people would be fired from their jobs with that kind of performance.

This is all hypothetical of course and a worst case scenario. But I give it those two and see what happens. We may win both, but when OC is blaming officials, it gives the sense of a man who is slowly coming to the realisation that he is man on borrowed time.

He may not be scared for his job. But he should be. Time waits for no man. And he has little left.

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Hey, Fantasy League time, and a new leader in Croston FC. Beertown Wanderers fall to second and the unpronouncable Alakerran~Flinttaus~ rise to third. Maybe it’s a new Scandanavian programme like The Killing or Borgen? Elsewhere, two teams of the week in I’ll Get Back To You and Leg-Ends. If you to want to get together and decide how best to spend this metaphorical tenner, that’ll be great.

Right, back tomorrow with some more gubbins. Until then, there’s always an objective. Always a target.

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