Just about all of the other threads are very understandably very negative and that's my over-riding emotion since Saturday too. What a bunch of bottlers.

Any year Bolton Wanderers spend out of the top two divisions is a year too long. We are now going to spend a sixth consecutive season in the lower divisions. Slowly but surely we're escalating towards the full decade we endured in the 80s and early 90s. 

However ... taking the long view, are there reasons why a further year in League 1 might prove to have been the right thing? 

1. This team bottles big games. In the Championship there are big games far more often. Quite apart from debating the balance of the squad and the quality in the side they simply seem to lack to the big game mentality. The Championship would surely have chewed up and spat out our lily-livered playing staff. 

2. Ipswich are an outlier. It's not often promoted teams thrive at tier 2 these days. You have to get a foothold and scrap your way to safety. That would be a problem linked to (1) but how many of the current squad can we honestly say are Championship ready in terms of playing standard alone? Going back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, we would not have been ready for tier 2 with a forward line of Storer/Philliskirk/Reeves - as much as they did good things for us. However we were ready with Walker/McGinlay/Lee. Things sometimes just need to evolve a bit more before they align. 

3. There are scores to settle in League 1. We still want that win at Bloomfield Road (hopefully while preserving our own long unbeaten home run against the orange wankers). Then there is Wigan. That run of misfortune v them has to stop. Next season we get at least two more shots at it. I recall the double over Wigan in 92/3 when Bruce got us promoted. It felt like the right way to be saying goodbye to them (for what proved to be more than a decade).  A much lesser local issue but Stockport fans are a mouthy lot and like to point out they've never lost at the Reebok. Be nice to sort that. 

4. Combining the themes of derby matches and whether we were Championship ready this year - I'm not so sure I'd have fancied having to play Burnley, Blackburn and PNE with this present lot. It could have been carnage.

Hopefully we will come to view our failure this season as a necessary evil as we develop/evolve further so that when we do hit the Championship we are properly equipped.

 

Just to be clear my original post was not trying to say I'm glad we didn't go up. Nor was it really about trying to identify silver linings. It was more about putting a historical BWFC context around these things and pointing out that in the longer run sometimes these disasters  end up sending us via a path that leads us to good things in the end. 

I wish we'd gone up on Saturday like everybody else and if we'd struggled next year I'd have snatched your hand off for 4th bottom in the knowledge that this time when finishing there we'd be with a safe board and not Mr Anderson.

The one parallel from history I didn't draw was with the last time we had an ex central defender of a manager who loved pretty football. He had one fabulous season and then two that were affected by bad luck and us often being bullied. Colin Todd's sacking led to the arrival of one Mr S Allardyce, the rest was history. 

 

I’d have loved to have had a crack at the Championship and imo we’d only have needed two or three signings to have a decent chance at survival.
But we have to move on.

Next season will be different.

 

 

I would rather have championship problems than league 1 problems.

On 22/05/2024 at 00:16, Lostock Whites said:

The Barnsley first leg to me is a blueprint. Mixing it up, being unpredictable and doing what it takes to win ugly. You cannot get promoted otherwise. 

That's my frustration, that game showed that Evatt and this set of players could adapt and do things differently, and it could work. They did it well that night. Even if it wasn't the approach every week but deployed selectively, most of those 10 games Iles set out in an article the other day would have had different outcomes and we'd have sailed up. 

At least we should win more than we lose……..