Where Did It All Go Wrong?

We are shite, we all know that. Some will admit it, some are still in denial, but ultimately the club is in trouble both on and off the field.

So where did it all go wrong? Was it the day Fat Sam buggered off? Was it the day Gary Megson was appointed? Is Owen Coyle to blame? Or was it something more complex than simply the manager? Was Elmander a bigger influence than we thought? If we'd had a fit Stuart Holden would we still be in the Premier League?

So what do you think, what was the turning point in our history that sent us on this downward spiral?

Its a temporary glitch...The riches of the Premier League will be the instruction to Uncle Phil - He will have to sack Coyle if things don't improve sharpish!!

It's really a combination of things. The players need to knuckle down and play as if their future football careers depend on it. It's no good thinking we are just down from the Premiership on a one season sabbatical. There are too many hungry teams in the Championship who are hungrier than ourselves at the moment ( Kitman excluded )

It all went wrong on the day somebody in the boardroom agreed we could slash salaries and survive without a solid defence.

Not prepared for relegation and not set up for the Championship.

I still blame a combination of Allardyce & Gartside.

Allardyce had an ageing squad and didn't have an eye on the future, without any youth the team had no long-term future. So he messed up there. But if Gartside had given Allardyce the £40m he gave Megson we'd probably have made the Champions League that year and our future would have been totally different.

Of course it's not helped having crap managers like Lee, Megson & Coyle but I blame Allardyce for this mess myself.

They are a bunch of feckless twats with a feckless twat of a manager a dope in gartside and it all started when the fat man went. I don't believe for one minute gartside wants us going up. That's why the fat man went . Time the fans demonstrated with their feet .

I'd go further. We banked on attacking flair without a ruthless finisher or three. To compensate, we banked on throwing numbers forward from midfield without a watertight back four. And to top it off, our "flair" players are not ball winners when we don't have possession.

But apart from that, we're fine.

wanderlust wrote:
But apart from that, we're fine.

Didn't the Captain of the Titanic say the same thing?

A circus of one-trick ponies is fine if they're doing the right tricks in the right places.

BTW AD I'll bet PG is absolutely desperate for us to go up. Relegation clearly wasn't in the plan - the strategy was to survive in the Prem - not set the world on fire - just survive, but with a reduced wage bill.

He's clearly tearing his hair out at the moment and he's fairly follicly challenged as it is, and if it gets any worse OC will be the fall guy, but the thought of compen and the expense of a new manager is deferring the decision as extra cost is the opposite of what was planned for.

wanderlust wrote:BTW AD I'll bet PG is absolutely desperate for us to go up. Relegation clearly wasn't in the plan - the strategy was to survive in the Prem - not set the world on fire - just survive, but with a reduced wage bill.

He's clearly tearing his hair out at the moment and he's fairly follicly challenged as it is, and if it gets any worse OC will be the fall guy, but the thought of compen and the expense of a new manager is deferring the decision as extra cost is the opposite of what was planned for.

But the £70 million sky money far outweighs the cost of shipping these useless twats out, and if he does it now it gives the new manager time to sort it out, leave it until Christmas, you have mission impossible, question is who to bring in, my choice would be Gus Poyett.

We got Megson in, largest mistake of our Premier League history.

I think it's all SKD's fault

It went wrong when you binned Megson and stole our manager. You can blame Gartside for both of them.

If your lot and Gartside had enough balls to wait until the summer of 2010 then we might both still be in the Premier League (with different managers of course).

How daft do most of the 2,500 Bolton fans singing for an opposition manager at t'Turf look now?

Well done Phil.

Last season we were a very bad Premiership side, this season we are a poor Championship side with a clueless manager who has replaced good players with inferior ones. Not one of our starting eleven yesterday would get in a Premier leagues team, they probably wouldn't get in the Birmingham team.

The turning point was when they decided to give Sammy Lee the job instead of advertising it. We were a top 8 Premiership club and could have attracted interest from managers and coaches all over the world.

Phil "people who know about football will understand this" Gartside decided otherwise. Downward spiral ever since. Genius.

It might be me but Mugson looks like a genius compared with the Haggis man.

The slide began when we got rid of Big Sam and kept Fat Phil.

Numpty 28723 wrote:The turning point was when they decided to give Sammy Lee the job instead of advertising it. We were a top 8 Premiership club and could have attracted interest from managers and coaches all over the world.

Phil "people who know about football will understand this" Gartside decided otherwise. Downward spiral ever since. Genius.

Nail on the head!

The appointment of Sammy Lee, while I'm sure it was done in good faith, was a complete and catastrophic error of judgement.

sitting in the top 8 of the league, year after year, 2x european qualification and a good squad we could have attracted an excellent mid level manager, instead we went for a complete rookie in the "interests of continuity" - his first act was to drop Nolan and Campo and rip every bit of "continuity" he could get his hands on.

once he'd put us in the gutter Gartside still, IMO, had the option to plump for a better manager than Megson but he went for the staid, unpopular, warhorse choice. Ok, Megson did a job, but he also spunked almost every penny we'll ever see up the wall on some extremely poor/average players who he wildly overpaid for.

And then we went for Coyle who was not the "fans choice" as many say, look at all the polls, the fans choice was Hughes, when it emerged that Coyle was in the frame (out of the blue) he became a popular choice because of his links to the club, but to say people were picking him out before the whispers is just bollocks.

Numpty 28723 wrote:The turning point was when they decided to give Sammy Lee the job instead of advertising it. We were a top 8 Premiership club and could have attracted interest from managers and coaches all over the world.

Phil "people who know about football will understand this" Gartside decided otherwise. Downward spiral ever since. Genius.

Absolutely bang on! we were nailed on for Europe and were an attractive proposition for any decent manager/coach so what did Gartside and the board do? the bloody 'Bolton option', i.e.the cheap option. Internal promotions/appointments have never worked for us - George Mullhall et al, anybody? Blame Gartside - doesn't seem to scrimp with his own pay and bonuses though, and what exactly do the rest of the board do?? I really would like to know.

Hipster_Nebula wrote: but to say people were picking him out before the whispers is just bollocks.

Bollocks. People on various forums were having orgasms about Coyle as soon as Megson got the push.