Bolton News

David Wheater

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Can’t say anything bad about him now, can I?

Evening all. Yesterday I related to you the tale of one of my mother’s mammoth hikes in Scotland and tried to compare a snails pace to the David Wheater transfer.

Well, lo and flaming behold, little more than twelve hours later the snail appeared to get a rocket up its backside and I awoke to a tweet from Marc Iles talking about how they breed them tough in the north east as he met him face to face. Read into that what you will. Face to face….hmmmm….

Now, I don’t think I ever had a problem with getting back up to the first choice two, especially as we let AOB go to Leeds, and think Wheater is a good buy in that respect. But until July at least that is and should be all he will be. A good buy? Only time will tell but the amount that is being bandied about, £2.5 million, is still a lot to pay for a player who has played the last eighteen months in the Championship, and in a fairly middling Championship team at that. He will have a lot to do if he wants to usurp the Cahill/Knight dynamic and even with his signing, we are probably still light one central defender, Sam Ricketts really being the only other viable alternative. However, now he has got the man he has been after since before the year started, the manager can now set his sights on other signings, starting probably with Carlos Vela.

The manager himself has said about the signing:

‘The club have parted with good money to secure the services of a very talented player who has been involved with England squads before. We want him to be involved at that level again and to do that he will have to play well for Bolton Wanderers, however he has arrived here with a real desire to achieve that. He has a great character as well. He will integrate into the group straight away and it all adds to the fantastic spirit that we have within the squad.’

It seems that he has got straight into the spirit with Matty Taylor tweeting earlier and calling him ‘Wheats’ (seriously, in the week that the ‘Lion of Vienna’ dies, can we not come up with a better nickname? The nickname that my friends call me has nothing to do with my name) and ‘Wheats’ himself has said:

‘From what I’ve seen there is a really great atmosphere at the club and a real buzz about the place and I’m looking forward to working hard and showing the manager what I can do.’

You’d have hopefully thought that the manager has already seen what he can do, which is why he pursued him. Still, having seen his fizzog on the official website, you wouldn’t be mistaking him for anyone else, would you?

So, welcome to Bolton Wanderers, David. Hope you like the bench for now.

Onto other things, and Chelsea are making a big thing about Frank Lampard being available for Monday’s game, like his return from long term injury has given them some sort of boost. Fair play, they did beat Blackburn last weekend, but we did that with ten men. There was a time when the name Frank Lampard would have given you a shudder if you were a supporter of a club team (internationally, not so much) but all I can do now is look at him, which reminds me how much he looks like his cousin, which reminds me of those crappy Thomas Cook adverts that he and his wife are in and then I just scream at the TV. It doesn’t even matter if it’s on.

Monday night games at The Reebok are a special thing and will be more so come Monday when we have a chance to honour Nat. Put aside the thought that we haven’t go a result from them since the last game of 2007-08, by which time they had given up, realising that any result wouldn’t get them the title. Put aside the thought that we haven’t beaten them at home since Dean Holdsworth scored in a 1-0 win back in 1997. Put aside the fact that we should have got something from them over Christmas and that last season they did us 4-0 at T’Reebok, although that was #megsonsfault. Monday night is our club’s night. Remember that, believe in that, and the fancy dans from West London will be no match.

And I firmly believe that.

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From the North, In the North.

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