BOLTON WANDERERS
JOHN WRAGG LOOKS AT HOW A FAMOUS OLD CLUB HAVE LOST THEIR WAY ...
Their sad decline
THE Reverend Joseph Farrall Wright and a school master Thomas Ogden founded Bolton Wanderers – then Christ Church FC - 145 years ago. They need a few prayers now. If not a eulogy.
And they certainly need to learn a few lessons.
It’s only 11 years ago since Bolton were playing in the last 16 of the UEFA Cup, going out 2-1 on aggregate to Sporting Lisbon, having drawn with Bayern in Munich and beaten Atletico Madrid and Red Star Belgrade on the way.
Tottenham were in that same competition, so were Everton.
All three English clubs failed to reach the quarter-finals. But that’s not the point. Bolton were their equals.
Now look at them.
When you cover football for national newspapers, you drive up and down the country and you have football grounds you like.
I always liked Burnden Park, Bolton’s home for 102 years.
There was a big space at the front of the ground where you could park for a start. Always a bonus, that, rather than nosing through streets to find a spot.
You were never quite sure whether your car would be there when you got back. Or if it was whether it would still be in one piece.
This didn’t happen at Bolton, it was Liverpool actually, but it gives you an idea of what it was like.
When you parked in the streets the local lads would make a few bob. They’d come up to you with the offer ‘Mind your car, sir?’.
They never did of course. As soon as they’d got their quid from enough customers they’d be off.
So this time I said no, I’d got a dog in the car, he’ll look after it.
This scally looked at me for a minute and then said: “Can your dog put out fires?”
So that’s a first tick for Burnden Park - security and no intimidation.
It was in that car park you met players.
The custom in those days, circa the 1970s, was for reporters to wait after a game and nab whichever player you
wanted to talk to. No Press officers, no post-match Press conferences, no forest of TV cameras, it was still the game of the people.
They headed to the same car park you were in, stopped, talked, job done.
Jimmy Armfield, his pipe going, was manager when I was covering Bolton games, as was Ian Greaves. Before those two it was Nat Lofthouse ahead of him becoming administration manager and Armfield taking the team.
Lofthouse (452 games for Bolton, 256 goals) seemed a giant of a man in civvies just as he did as a powerful centre-forward, when in fact he was only 5ft 9 inches. He stripped big.
His club is just stripped.
Bolton moved to their current ground in 1997. It’s quite futuristic and when built 22 years ago stood out, modern and bright against the old industrial town, like a brash teenager at a golden wedding.
There’s a statue of Lofthouse outside what is now called the University of Bolton Stadium. No one’s seen a tear yet, but there’s sure to be one.
One of the founder members of the Football League, Notts County, were relegated from it for the first time this season. Bolton, with mismanagement and near constant crisis, are doing their best to follow.
Bolton, Notts, Macclesfield, Bury, Oldham, Charlton, Blackpool and, one of the biggest of them all, Aston Villa, have all had financial troubles and poor ownership in the last 12 months.
Coventry City have almost been run into the ground by terrible owners who are still there.
That fit and proper person test aimed at keeping rogue owners and directors out of football is a waste of time. They might as well burn it.
Bolton were relegated from the Championship with three games still left to play.
One of them never did get played, against Brentford when unpaid players went on strike and by the time Bolton got to the last day of the season at Nottingham Forest, the PFA were their
part-sponsors, paying some of the wages.
Bolton have struggled ownership-wise since the Eddie Davies days ended three years ago.
It’s no way for a club with four FA Cups to their name, one of them the iconic White Horse Final, and three losing finals, one of those the Matthews Final, to live.
Phil Parkinson is the manager who has had to deal with all this. He cut a demoralised, battered but honourable figure when I saw him after a 4-0 battering at Derby which could easily have been doubled.
By the time I saw him again in Bolton’s final game of the season at Nottingham Forest he was a man in need of both a rest and some good decision-making in a new boardroom.
“I’ve been in football since I was 16, so that’s 35 years and the things I’ve experienced in these three years at Bolton, particularly this season, I have never been close to experiencing anywhere else,” says Parkinson.
“It’s been quite extraordinary at times but we have stuck together, tried to conduct ourselves in a creditable, professional way.
“Bolton is a terrific club, it really is. If you were around the stadium, the training ground and you met the people who work at the club, who support the club and have been supporters for many years, so many good people are connected with the club, great history, it’s very sad that the name of Bolton has been dragged through the mud.
“But the club will be back, I am absolutely convinced of that. Hopefully in a few years’ time people will look back at this experience and say ‘did we really have to go through that?’.
“It’s not going to be a light switch flicked and it suddenly turns round, it’s going to be a process of building back the club’s reputation.
“Over a period of time the club has got to work to build back its credibility, it’s reputation in the football world, build back relationships with other clubs, build back relationships with agents.
“It has to build back the name of Bolton Wanderers and when it does it will come back stronger than ever.
“But am I be glad this season is over? That’s a good way of putting it.”
There was just the deep sigh of pain missing.
It was all over for Bolton, at least on the pitch, and the ‘R’ was put against their name in the Championship table after their home defeat to Aston Villa.
There’s an irony there because Villa came so close to being beyond rescue last summer. Owner Tony Xia, who had an eye bigger than his financial belly, was totting up losses of £5m a month.
The losses for three years had reached over £131m and had billionaires Nassef Sawiris and Wes Edens not bought the club, it would have gone bust.
Sawiris (family worth £27b ) and Edens (personally worth £1.9b) have experience of running a business in sport. Edens co-owns American basketball team Milwaukee Bucks and has doubled their worth from half a billion bucks to $1.07b.
Sawiris and Edens have put £68m into Aston Villa so far and the club look secure, but Bolton still needs safe hands. Over 50 clubs, like Bolton, have gone into administration in recent years, the champions of England three years ago, Leicester City, were among them in 2002.
So it can happen. It can be done. You can come back, as Parkinson says.
Bolton were called ‘Wanderers’ because in their early Victorian years they couldn’t find a permanent home. They had three grounds in four years - hence the Wanderers. Not a lot has changed. Bolton are still searching, in need of an owner with stability and the money to back up the rhetoric. You have to look, just to double check, to see if that tear is in Nat Lofthouse’s eye yet.