Ehhhhhh Doooooogie
So Dougie Freedman whom we all love and adore has expressed his sympathy towards Bolton Wanderers- that team he used to manage. He has also expressed his frustration over finances there at the time and has said that the current situation we find ourselves in comes as no surprise to himself.
The Bolton News quote him saying:
“When I first went there, I tried to buy Danny Ings for £1.2m. But we couldn`t get the money together,
“That prompted a huge amount of suspicion for me. Given that it was a side that had just come down.
“The day we missed out on the play-offs – when Leicester got in there on the final day.
“I knew we were in big trouble after that; it was a club in decline and this was coming.”
My question here is, in his infinite wisdom, surely you`d expect to know a bit about the club`s finances before you join. Either he was in dreamland, or the job had been mis-sold to him which is equally plausible.
The latter is interesting to explore actually, because following his successes in Scotland, Neil Lennon seemed destined for a Premier League/ big Championship club and, thinking that we were a big club (basically because we`d been in the Premier League recently and have a decent stadium) chose us in what was perhaps a bit of a rash decision. That said, surely a better job must have been sold to him. Throughout the summer, Lennon had been insisting that Phil Gartside was reassuring him that finance would be made available at some point and that investment would come in but that never materialised.
However, I do have a point to make to Dougie. You had a Championship team with Chris Eagles, Martin Petrov, Kevin Davies and Craig Dawson and we still didn`t even make the play-offs. And I know money was somewhat tight then (although now looking back on it, his days would seem like financial heaven for us now) but just a few months prior to your arrival, expensive additions such as Matt Mills, Keith Andrews and Andy Lonergan were made and he went on later to bring in players of his own such as Craig Davies, Medo Kamara and friends?
I`m left with a few questions now- 1) how have we sold such a tough job to two managers with flawless CV`s prior to joining us? 2) does Dougie Freedman really think he had it that bad? 3) is Dougie Freedman the oracle?