A bit on what I think of Dougie Freedman and his departure
Many many fans called for Dougie Freedman’s sacking. He joined a club that really should have been promoted from the Championship in its first year.
Players like Chris Eagles, Kevin Davies and Marcos Alonso were heads and shoulders above the standard of your typical Championship player.
To his credit, Dougie didn’t do a bad job given our poor start to the season. New arrivals Craig Dawson and Medo Kamara helped push the team up to 7th in the league.
There were some slightly dodgy signings by Freedman- for example Steve De Ridder and Danny Butterfield made absolutely no positive impact to the club.
Ahead of the next season, fans were confident on promotion. However, we were very disappointing yet again. We should have been seen as promotion contenders with the revitalisation of Matt Mills and Tim Ream along with the signing of Jay Spearing on a permanent basis.
However, last season’s key man, Chris Eagles had a disappointing season bar his first few matches.
Loanee signings Lukas Jutkiewicz and Joe Mason helped the club to a mid table finish, though in reality we could have easily ended up much further down the table.
Other signings, such as Liam Trotter, seemed uninspirational and frustrated many fans.
Ahead of this season, Dougie made a few signings, though none really excited fans.
We started terribly and thus he was sacked.
Dougie’s reign at the club was, on the whole, disappointing. However there were a few successes during his tenure. The late surge up the table in our first Championship was definitely a highlight. The form of Chris Eagles and the pairing or Jutkiewicz and Mason were very exciting.
The former Crystal Palace manager brought a great deal of integrity to the position in my opinion. I’ve always felt that no matter the situation, Freedman was very honest and generally a top person.
There were criticisms of some of the things he’d said in press conferences, though I feel that would have been more confusion than lying or playing mind games.
I’ve said it before and I’ve heard it from other people. I have always appreciated the personalities of both Owen Coyle and Dougie Freedman. No matter what the result, they remained good people. That may sound pointless but at the end of the day it’s very important.
Ultimately too many mistakes led to Dougie’s sacking. He was stubborn with formations and maybe didn’t recruit correctly over the Summer.
I would like to thank Mr Freedman for his efforts at the club, though. I did say that I thought he should be sacked, though I cannot question the effort he put into this job in any way.
This was a very difficult job and whoever takes it on next will have the hard task of renovating the entire squad as many of them are ‘Dougie’s players’ like Dean Moxey and Owen Garvan- both of whom have been the subject of much criticism. The resources available to Freedman’s successor will be limited and building a squad will be extremely tough.
A few former Bolton players who worked under Freedman attacked him via social media. Jay Lynch and Gregg Wylde criticised the way their former manager treated them.
I really do not like seeing this kind of thing. I feel bad for Lynch as he’s a talented player now at Salford. I felt that Wylde’s mentality was completely wrong during his time at Bolton- go figure he didn’t feature under Coyle either. Whether or not he was that hard to work with, I am very disappointed by the the reaction from these players.
The future of Dougie’s right hand men, Lennie Lawrence and Curtis Fleming is in serious doubt. It is thought that both will/have leave/left. I’ve never really known what Lawrence does, given that he’s Director of Football though we only signed players we already knew about from Crystal Palace or Cardiff. Fleming always looked to try to rally the players up from the touchline and I do admire that. I’m not sure about the impact he made, but he certainly looked to work hard.
So there we have it, Dougie gone. I wish him all the best in the future and I believe that he can become a successful manager in the future. He’s young with a lot to learn and we’ll have to see.
Thanks for your efforts, Douglas.