Our second visit to Bolton Wanderers this season is on Saturday, with kick-off at 3pm. You’ll find the Macron stadium on the western edge of town, and you should have a good time as long as you don’t try to get there by train.

If you come off the M61 at junction 6 you really can't miss it, though the surrounding roads always get very congested on matchdays. Out of town stadia are supposed to benefit those who drive to matches, but it always seems to me that fans simply get stuck in more traffic due to a higher proportion of the crowd coming by car.

There is a large away car park right outside the Macron (visiting fans use car park 'A') but it costs £6 and you wait at least half an hour to get out afterwards as the police hold the traffic back to let the buses get away first. A lot of the off-street parking in the nearby Lostock Industrial estate is allocated to home fans, although there are some units in the industrial estate which will let you park for £4-5. One other option is to park at the Beehive Pub (see below).

And if you fancy a bit of exercise and want to avoid the congestion, you can park at the ‘Brinsop Country Inn’ on the Chorley Road (A6), on the other side of the M61, which is about a 15 minute walk from the stadium. It costs £4 to park there, but the pub has good beer and reasonably priced food, with home and visiting fans mixing together. From here you can easily get away after the game straight back onto the motorway.

There is a new railway station called Horwich Parkway, a few minutes walk from the stadium, but this weekend there will be rail replacement buses running between Manchester and Bolton (though you can still get there by train if your journey involves going via Preston).You would hope that they would lay enough buses on to accommodate all the extra Leeds fans, but I wouldn’t bank on it.

It’s all because the line is currently being electrified, and the project is taking much longer than originally planned. It’ll be good when it’s finished, but that’s not likely to be much use to us, as by then Bolton Wanderers will be either in League One or out of business.

Another disadvantage of out of town stadia are the complete absence of decent traditional pubs and takeaways, and the bars on the nearby retail park are for home fans only. This is strictly enforced by the usual burly chaps on the door, who will only let fans in if they have a match ticket for the one of the home parts of the stadium.

But you can find a couple of decent places by continuing past the stadium once you have left the M61. There is the Barnstormers on Lostock Lane (from the M61, go past the stadium on your left, move into the right hand filter lane and turn right at the traffic lights into Lostock Lane, the pub is down on the right) which does admit away fans. There is also a mixture of street parking and paid parking (at some industrial units) in this area. Or you could continue to the roundabout at the junction with Chorley New Road (the A673), where you will find the Beehive. This establishment charges £5 for parking, which you can reclaim at the bar.

There are the usual drive-through Pizza Hut and KFCs that you get in most retail parks, while the nearest traditional food outlet is 'Settles' at the top end of Burnden way (the main road that goes past the stadium). So for once it's an attractive option to eat and drink inside the stadium, where the pies are highly recommended as well as the John Smith's.

The Macron cost £45 million to build and has a capacity of 28,723, opening in 1997 after the club decided that their old ground at Burnden Park could never be brought up to the standards demanded by the Taylor report. At the time I was sorry to see them leave such an historic venue, not least because the old ground still had terracing for a couple of years after the Premiership had gone all-seater, but at least the design of the Macron is a bit more stylish than most of the identikit new stadia that have popped up around the country in recent years.

For league games away fans get a maximum allocation of 4,800 in the two tiered South Stand at one end of the ground, but for this game we’ve been given as many as 6,850 tickets. I’m not sure if this is because of the rules of the FA cup or because Bolton a desperate to get some extra cash, but we’re also getting part of the stand to the left of the normal away end.

The official Leeds site says that as of first thing this morning we had 700 tickets left, and that it’s “all ticket for away fans” with none being sold on the day. For this game the price has been reduced to £20 for adults and only £5 for over 65s and under 23s, though fans with concession rate tickets need to show proof of age at the turnstiles. Bolton are only selling tickets for the ‘home’ parts of the stadium to “supporters with a previous booking history, excluding past fixtures against Leeds United.”

Generally the away accommodation is pretty good (as you would expect from such a new stadium) but there are one or two little niggles. The stewards at the Reebok can sometimes be a bit over zealous, and tell fans to sit down, but I’ve yet to see them try to do this with a full Leeds end who are all standing! And the upper tier is so steep that the local authority insisted they put handrails along the gangways, which block the view from some of the seats.

All in all this has the makings of a great day out, with a large contingent of Leeds fans making plenty of atmosphere. I’m told that we’re usually the noisiest away fans to come to Bolton and I’m glad our efforts are appreciated. It’s just a shame that it could be our last visit to the Macron for quite some time.

Some of this stuff came from www.footballgroundguide.com .

Photo: Action Images

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