Bolton are one of five teams fighting against relegation from the Premiership after losing a succession of quality players to injury and transfers without adequately replacing them.
The last time QPR were relegated from the Premiership, back in 1996, Bolton Wanderers went with them and the similarities between the Wanderers team of today and the QPR side of 16 years ago are stark.
QPR ultimately suffered a death from a thousand cuts that season – once too often they’d allowed quality to leave Loftus Road and replaced it with mediocrity. Paul Parker, Andy Sinton, Darren Peacock and Clive Wilson had left with only Sinton, with Trevor Sinclair, adequately replaced. Les Ferdinand went in his prime and Rangers brought in Mark Hateley who was well past his. And manager Gerry Francis went too, tired of all of this and with stock high enough to attract employment elsewhere, with the inexperienced and, as it turned out, incompetent Ray Wilkins filling the hot seat. A football club can shed only so much quality without replacement before a hefty price is paid and so it proved.
That said I don’t recall (bearing in mind my age at the time) too many people expecting us to be relegated that season. Despite Ferdinand moving and Clive Wilson being released, despite the questionable summer signings, I don’t recall mongers of doom stalking the hallway of the old Goldhawk prophesising about trips to Barnsley. The season started slowly, but QPR seasons always seemed to start slowly back then and wins against Man City at home and away at Leeds and our fellow strugglers Bolton seemed to settle everybody down. A false sense of security.
Fast forward to the present day and I can remember sitting out on the balcony at LFW Towers back in August, the sun burning through the smog created when most of Tottenham was razed to the ground in the build up to our opening game of the season, prophesising that despite a similar set of circumstances to QPR all those years ago Bolton would probably be alright this season. Easy to be wise after the event but I also remember sitting down to write that article thinking they were probably in trouble, then changing my mind when I thought I could see eight or nine teams who were worse – including Norwich and Swansea.
Bolton have done what QPR did in 1995 – allowed quality to drift out of the squad without adequate replacement. They finished last season with Daniel Sturridge in exceptional form on loan from Chelsea and Johan Elmander finally living up to his reputation after a disappointing spell overall. Having waited three years for the Swedish international to hit form Bolton then had to watch as he left for Galatasaray in the summer. That left Kevin Davies, not getting any younger, to be joined by Tuncay who continues to live off one half decent season in a poor Middlesbrough team and Davd Ngog who was the weak link in enough dire 0-0 draws under Rafael Benitez at Liverpool for everybody, apart from Owen Coyle, to know he wasn’t up to the job.
To borrow Billy Bean’s Moneyball analysis for a moment Bolton had replaced two strikers who’d scored 18 goals for them the season before with two who had scored half that.
In midfield too, though certainly through no fault of their own, classy USA international Stuart Holden and Korean Chung Yong Lee are yet to kick a ball in anger this season having both suffered horrendous injuries. The replacements - Nigel Reo-Coker, Fabrice Muamba, Chris Eagles and Mark Davies – have been abject by comparison.
In defence they did manage to hang onto Gary Cahill but, possibly affected by the mountain of speculation and uncertainty throughout the summer, he was a shadow of the player who impressed so much last season in the first half of this campaign. Now gone for good he’s been replaced by USA centre half Tim Ream who may well go onto be a very good player for the club, but is no kind of replacement for Cahill however bad the England man’s form has been this season.
At right full back Coyle wanted to play Sam Ricketts but he also started the season with a long term injury so he bought Tyrone Mears only for him to suffer a broken leg in pre-season. Coyle then turned to Dedryck Boyata on loan from Man City but the manager has openly criticised his performances frequently this season. On the opposite side Marcus Alonso missed four months with a broken foot and was then rushed back against Blackburn only to go off injured again. Still, when Paul Robinson is your back up left back it’s not surprising that a Spanish 21-year-old in a new country playing on one leg is viewed as a better option.
All set to the backdrop of another £26m financial loss last season which took them past the £100m debt barrier for the first time these are worrying times for Wanderers.
Simple one to start, what's gone wrong?
Simple question, simple answer; games just haven't gone to plan. We've looked well below par in too many games and often seem to have no strategy. We’ve been clueless at times and failed to take chances even when they've been handed to us on a plate.
Do you think Bolton will survive? What do you think the bottom three will be?
I think we'll survive - we have too good a squad to drop to the lower tier. Blackburn and Wigan are definite candidates for the drop. Both have been fighting the drop for a few seasons or so you're bound to lose the fight at some point. Wolves are another team that may finally go down. QPR have invested well, hence we feel they'll hang on to see another season of Premier League football.
Bolton have stuck by Owen Coyle - is this the right decision, will he stay if the club is relegated and what are the fans feelings towards the manager?
If we do get relegated, we're sure Owen Coyle will stay with Bolton - as long as the fans still want him there. The majority of the fans are currently still in support of our manager. If he was to go, who in their right mind would manage Bolton given the levels of debt, lack of transfer resources etc?
Who have been the weak links in the team? Who has played well?
From the start of the season, you couldn't miss the fact that the left back position was a weak spot for Bolton. A huge amount of the goals we have conceded this season have come from that position. We've had a below par strikeforce, and we've been hit by major injuries in midfield. All in all the whole team have suffered. Although fans would name Paul Robinson as the weakest link, it's much more than that - the whole team have at times been questionable. We need to man up and take control of our own future otherwise, we're doomed.
What does the team need adding to it?
Plenty of balls (not the spherical type you kick around the pitch), a couple of cans of Red Bull and an actual strategy.
Bolton's debt is well documented, could the club survive a relegation?
That's one area we're always concerned about. We could start a whole new discussion on this but let’s just say, the less said about Bolton and finance the better. Although we can't ignore it for long, some serious changes will have to take place at the club if it's going to survive financially and in the Premier League. We need wage caps, transfer spending caps etc - if this isn't looked at soon, football will be a thing of the past. Just look at what's happened to Rangers.
One of the many questions to ask about Bolton’s dreadful season is how much of the blame should be attached to manager Owen Coyle. Two of the five strugglers this season – QPR and Wolves – have sacked their managers in an effort to stay up while Blackburn have been doing their best to hound theirs out of position since day one. Wigan and Bolton have stuck with theirs and trotted out the mantra of them being young managers doing a sound job in difficult circumstances.
Coyle has been hamstrung by the injuries that Bolton have had but the long term absences of Ricketts and Holden were known to him before the summer transfer window began, as was the departures of Elmander and Sturridge. Only the blows to Mears, who wasn’t there last season anyway, and Chung Yong Lee will have come as a surprise to him.
I’m certainly no great lover of Gary Megson, in fact you may have felt your house shake slightly last week owing to the laugh I let out when I heard Sheffield Wednesday had sacked him, but Bolton fans hounded him out of position for arguably less than Coyle has done this season.
To be honest I don’t even believe that myself despite writing it. I’d advocate any fan of any team managed by Gary Megson driving the odious twat away whatever results he’s achieving on the pitch, and all the signs at Bolton were that he would have taken them down himself shortly anyway playing far worse football than they do these days. I’m minded to give Coyle the benefit of the doubt and point to budget constraints and horrendous luck with injury rather than any incompetence on his part, although ‘lack of strategy’ seems to be coming up an awful lot when I speak to Bolton fans about their team.
Coyle cut his teeth with St Johnston after a spell in joint charge at Falkirk with John Hughes. While with the Saints he took them, as a First Division side, to two cup semi finals. They beat Rangers at Ibrox for the first time in 35 years in the quarter finals of the Scottish League Cup and took Hibs to extra time before losing the Hampden semi. They got another crack at a semi final in the Scottish Cup thanks to away wins at SPL sides Falkirk and Motherwell but were this time beaten by Celtic. A year later, during the 2006/07 season, he took them to the Challenge Cup (think Football League Trophy) final against Dunfermline which they won but a week before that final Coyle left to join Burnley.
As a player Coyle had played both in Scotland and England. His CV includes spells with Dundee United, Motherwell, Falkirk, three separate tours of duty with Airdrie and 12 goals in 54 appearances at Bolton. At Burnley his achievements as a rookie manager were magnificent. The Clarets had developed a reputation under his predecessor Steve Cotterill as a club with an excellent starting eleven and absolutely no strength in depth. They would spend big money, the likes of Andy Gray and Ade Akinbiyi didn’t come cheap, but every winter injuries and suspensions would take a horrendous toll on their miniscule squad of players so that promotion winning form at either end of the season became the bread on a rather unpleasant relegation battle sandwich. For a club, and a town, the size of Burnley this lower mid-table existence in the Championship seemed about right.
Coyle though had other ideas and in his first full season in charge marched a confident, sassy, attractive Burnley side into the Premiership via a thoroughly deserved play off final victory against Sheffield United. They were a superb side to watch and won many friends along the way.
In the Premiership they did better than many newly promoted sides, and claimed the notable scalps of Sunderland, Everton and Man Utd in early home games. But like Norwich City before them they couldn’t marry mid-table home form with any sort of results on the road. Burnley were regularly thrashed in away games but had a fighting chance of staying up at the midpoint of the season when Bolton came calling for Coyle. Now having previously turned down the chance to go and manage Celtic it seemed an odd decision for Coyle to move to Bolton, but it was clear that at Burnley he had achieved all he could and with his Wanderers connections he decided to make the move. The Burnley fans now treat him as a pariah, apparently forgetting that he gave them a season of Premiership football when they least expected it and brought a fabulous style of football to their club. Such is life.
Their bitterness wasn’t helped much when Burnley went from having the best manager they could possibly have to the worst when they replaced Coyle with Brian Laws and were predictably immediately relegated. Despite replacing Laws with Eddie Howe last season that decision to go for the former Scunthorpe manwill set Burnley back five years and we won’t see them in the Premiership again for at least that long in my opinion.
At Bolton Coyle successfully fought the relegation battle he found himself in initially and then impressed all comers last season by building an attractive and competitive side which only finished as low as 14th because their form collapsed after a humiliating FA Cup semi final defeat by Stoke. That 5-0 set back, and five game losing run to finish the season, undermined Coyle’s good work and arguably the team is yet to recover.
The departures of Elmander and Sturridge have left them weak in attack, the injuries to Lee and Holden have left them short of quality in midfield, and their defence has been decimated by injuries and departures as well. This is not a good Bolton team.
They have the worst home record in the league, two wins and 11 defeats from the last 15 matches played with just two clean sheets in that time. In their first 16 matches this season they conceded 38 times. They have however taken ten points from that mini league of five at the bottom of the table which is the best record of the teams down there, QPR have the worst you won’t be surprised to learn.
Owen Coyle has frequently named and shamed individual players after defeats which always comes across as a desperate manager trying to get a reaction from people having tried everything else he knows. After a fourth consecutive defeat against Aston Villa in December he selected a midfield four made up entirely of central midfield players for the following match at Fulham but quickly found his team 2-0 down at half time at which point he sent Chris Eagles back on for Boyata who seems to have attracted Coyle’s ire more than most this season.
Bolton concede frequently from crosses and set pieces highlighting their defensive weakness in wide areas. At the turn of the year they’d conceded eight from corners and ten from crosses, both the league’s highest totals. When I saw them at Blackburn, a game they played relatively well in against a poor side and won 2-1, the defence was still a shambolic mess. Gary Cahill (since departed) was made to look a fool by Yakubu on occasions and Boyata was so out of favour by that point that Coyle picked Steinsson at right back ahead of him.
They’ve lost their last four league matches, but given that the last two were away at Chelsea and Man City you’d perhaps have expected that. It’s the defeat against fellow strugglers Wigan last time out on this ground that perhaps gives us the most clues of how we can win this game. Once again in that match, as at Fulham, improvements only came about when Coyle had made several substitutions and even then it wans’t enough to salvage points. Still, if QPR are to win then a fast start followed by high concentration levels when Coyle makes changes later would seem to be important – in the five league games they have won this season they’ve scored first in four of them.
Bolton lined up in a 442 against the Latics with Kevin Davies and David Ngog a less than inspiring front two that even QPR’s porous back line should be able to deal with if it’s selected again. Wigan matched them up and spread the ball wide and early, attacking Steinsson and Ricketts with Victor Moses and Jean Beausejour to great effect. Is this finally the day for Shaun Wright-Phillips to turn in a good performance in a QPR shirt.
When all is said and done a forward line of Bobby Zamora and Djibril Cisse should be too much for this Bolton defence to handle.
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