EFL TROPHY

[gaztruman]

Hopefully no slip ups tonight. Be very embarrassing to get knocked out now when we've got the perfect fixture to progress to the quarters. 

I worry about Dixon. 

[Sweep]

1 hour ago, L/H White said:

we're 1/3 on with sky

reds 13/2

Free money, get lumped on the away win 

[Traf]

5 hours ago, freds dad said:

I won two tickets for tonight but now can't make it.

Second prize was four tickets.

[royal white]

Can you pay on door tonight? My lad has just blagged me to go 😩😩

[Zico]

With Dixon and two U23s on the bench I can see as weak a starting XI as possible (6 weekend starters plus 4 u23s?) And more u23s on the bench to come on early 

Assuming the squad is being stretched, which Saturdays bench suggested  

 

[desperado]

(you can bypass the paid firewall if reading on a tablet/phone by pressing the “aA” icon, at the top left of the page, and selecting “show reader”)

Despite being written by a Red and the fact that it would make much better reading if we were playing the real team, it’s not a bad read.

Still don’t know if I’m going…..
 

 

[desperado]

8 minutes ago, royal white said:

Can you pay on door tonight? My lad has just blagged me to go 😩😩

It’s not pay on door. But you will be able to buy at ticket office. Or even easier buy on your phone and save in Iwallet. It’s an extra quid but worth the hassle. I’ve done this for previous cup games, it’s dead easy.

[DirtySanchez]

15 minutes ago, desperado said:

(you can bypass the paid firewall if reading on a tablet/phone by pressing the “aA” icon, at the top left of the page, and selecting “show reader”)

Despite being written by a Red and the fact that it would make much better reading if we were playing the real team, it’s not a bad read.

Still don’t know if I’m going…..
 

 

Not working for me though 

[Benny The Ball]

Cant help but wonder if this fixture could,  given the opposition, attract our  biggest ever Ifollow viewing figures ?

Anybody know what is our best ifollow match viewing figure to date ?

 

 

 

[radcliffe white]

Wonder if those so against this game will have a cheeky watch on tv

[royal white]

Just spoke to the ticket office. They’ve sold 1600 we’ve sold around 2600

 

EIEIEIO

[jmjhb]

No-one will care about attendance apart from notrights on Twitter and a few on here

[DazBob]

1 minute ago, jmjhb said:

No-one will care about attendance apart from notrights on Twitter and a few on here

Aye, just the usual crowd nonces.

[DazBob]

I actually hope we win tonight, but only for the sole reason of not losing to that lot's kids' team.

[gonzo]

 

Three months after the Munich air disaster, a cobbled-together ‘Manchester United’ side consisting of emergency signings and players who had seen their team-mates die, somehow reached the 1958 FA Cup final.

United’s first game after Munich had been against Sheffield Wednesday in the cup. So little was known about who would play that the line-up page was left blank in the programme. United won 3-0, carried on a wave of emotion. West Bromwich Albion were next in the sixth round. United drew away and won the replay 1-0 in front of a packed 60,000 crowd, in an era when Old Trafford seldom sold out. The semi-final was drawn 2-2 with Fulham, the replay won 5-3. This was a miracle.

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Bolton Wanderers, who finished 15th in the 22-team top flight that season (United came ninth), were their opponents in the final.

Everyone outside the Lancashire industrial town of 128,000 located 12 miles north west of Manchester wanted United to win. Yet Wanderers lifted their fourth FA Cup in controversial circumstances, with two Nat Lofthouse goals — controversial because United goalkeeper Harry Gregg, a hero of that awful night in Munich, was aggressively bundled into his net for one of them. Emotions were raw and United fans felt Bolton had been unsporting.

Bolton fans were rightly proud of their team and wanted the FA Cup badly after losing dramatically in the “Matthews final” against Blackpool five years earlier, when the great Sir Stanley inspired his team to a 4-3 victory.

The day after the victory over United, their team returned by train to Manchester and then travelled by open-top bus through Salford and on to Bolton.

The Mills & Seddon bus, from Farnworth in Bolton, had a “Welcome Home Bolton Wanderers” sign on the window.

Salford is a United heartland and the locals were not happy, ambushing the single-deck bus with old fruit, bags of flour, stones and sods of earth as it passed through the suburb of Irlams o’ th’ Height.

A window next to Lofthouse’s wife got smashed.

 

 

Bolton Wanderers goalscorer Nat Lofthouse (right) and Manchester United goalkeeper Harry Gregg (middle) during the 1958 FA Cup final (Photo: Allsport Hulton/Archive)

You can understand why some Bolton fans may have an issue with the bigger, more glamorous, more successful neighbours on their doorstep.

Tonight (Tuesday), the clubs meet for the first time in a decade. Kind of.

It’s Bolton’s first team, who play in League One these days, at home against United’s under-21s in the last 16 of the Papa Johns Trophy. United have sold 2,000 tickets — a significant number for a December night when a World Cup semi-final is being shown live on UK terrestrial TV.

 

 

United fans have been struck by the ferocity of abuse from Bolton fans when they were first promoted to the Premier League in 1995 having been in the EFL since relegation in 1979-80.

The teams had met throughout their history — the 23,000 United fans among a 38,152 crowd in March 1975 is considered one of the biggest away followings ever — but Bolton, mainly under Sam Allardyce, were regular Premier League performers who punched well above their weight and moved into one of the best new stadiums in football in 1997.

---

Let’s go back now to February 25, 1996.

United are away at Bolton’s old Burnden Park ground, complete with its pie shop opposite.

LS Lowry’s Going To The Match painting, which sold for £7.8million this year, shows Bolton’s former home, with billowing archetypal northern factories behind.

 

GO DEEPER

'It's coming home': LS Lowry’s Going to the Match sells for £7.8m - to the Lowry gallery

 

We (the “we” being 200 travelling United fans) are in and around a pub in Farnworth, the area where that ambushed parade bus in 1958 came from. Everyone is buzzing. It’s Bolton away, and the appetite for trouble is high. The plan is to walk from here to Burnden Park. Safety in numbers.

Several of the main United hooligans invite me to walk with them, so I can get some insight into their world. We march in a large mob that stretches for a hundred metres. The hatred is evident as soon as we came into contact, with old men in replica shirts wanting to fight. It doesn’t stop. The atmosphere is vile. Police intervene to make sure tempers don’t boil over. It’s pretty hairy and definitely not an environment to be wearing red. United fans who were not hooligans felt frightened.

“As we walked towards the ground an hour before kick-off, there was unusual congestion,” described one of those fans, Pete Molyneux. “We soon realised several hundred Bolton fans, instead of going through the turnstiles or into the pubs, were walking round trying to spot any United fans. We were in it before we realised how sinister it was. Luckily, no colours were on show among us but anyone with a hint of red and white got sneering verbal abuse or a slap round the head, or both. The scene was ugly. Very ugly.”

 

 

Inside the ground, the capacity has been cut to just 22,000 — in part because half the large terrace behind one goal has been sold off to a supermarket to save the club financially.

It’s a sad sight for a once proud football ground on a huge terrace which used to hold 26,000.

There’s a pathetic temporary stand seating 252 to the right, which attracted chants of, “What the fuckin’ hell is that?”

United win, 6-0. David Beckham, Steve Bruce, Andy Cole, Paul Scholes (twice) and Nicky Butt score.

It’s horrendous for relegation-threatened Bolton and, through the rain, United fans mockingly sing, “We’ll never play you again.”

 

Bolton did end up going down but they came straight back up and moved to their new stadium. After going straight back down in 1998, they came up in 2001 and stayed in the Premier League for 11 years finishing as high as sixth in 2004-05.

In October 2001, they won at Old Trafford, and they did it again in September 2002. Bolton twice played European football in the UEFA Cup (what is now the Europa League); in the 2007-08 group phase, they got a 2-2 draw with Bayern Munich in Germany and won 1-0 in Belgrade against Red Star, becoming the first English club to beat the Serbian giants on their own ground.

The Kevins of Davies and Nolan were stars, along with Gary Speed, Ivan Campo, Nicolas Anelka, Gary Cahill and El Hadji Diouf, Eidur Gudjohnsen, Fernando Hierro, Youri Djorkaeff and Jay-Jay Okocha.

Bolton boast four successive top-eight finishes in the Premier League. They also enjoyed fine cup moments in the 1990s and 2000s, twice reaching the League Cup final and twice the FA Cup semi-finals. Founder members of the Football League in 1888, they continued to be a name.

Bolton built a reputation for wily recruitment, using a mixture of ageing stars signed for low fees and given big wages leavened with youthful prospects. Gudjohnsen came on a free from his native Iceland in 1998 and was sold two years and 27 goals later for £5million to Chelsea. It helped that they had a wealthy benefactor in lifelong fan Eddie Davies, who’d been putting money into the club since 1999, but their model was successful.

Bolton’s size and resources made their achievement all the more creditable. The town is officially part of Greater Manchester but a fiercely proud place of its own, and has given the world comedian Peter Kay, champion boxer Amir Khan and Samuel Crompton, who invented the spinning mule that revolutionised the cotton industry and brought enormous wealth to the north of England in the 19th century.

---

It’s now 2001 and Sam Allardyce is driving along the M61 motorway from Bolton’s training ground to their ground, the then Reebok (now University of Bolton) Stadium.

A compliment about the club’s new home, which opened four years earlier, is met with a shake of the head as Allardyce says: “We built a monument when we needed a stadium.” Regardless, it was still an architectural gem in the sea of cheap, flat-packed, identikit bowls springing up around England at that time following the Taylor Report into the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster.

In November 2007, Bolton beat visitors United 1-0 in a league game in which Gerard Pique’s Old Trafford future was sidelined after he was outmuscled for the goal.

The rivalry was real. In the list of “11 teams we love to hate” in the Manchester United Rough Guide, Bolton were fifth behind only Liverpool, Manchester City, Arsenal and Leeds 

Times have changed.

Since their stay in the Premier League ended in 2012, Bolton have played in all three divisions of the EFL.

Though they didn’t cease to exist, the fate of neighbours Bury, they came close, with the club’s future threatened in 2016 because of money owned to HMRC — the UK tax authority. Attendances dropped from above 25,000 in the Premier League to below 15,000, with the annual wage bill going from £53million in 2012 to £13million six years later.

Worse, Bolton’s debt was £200million and though owner and lifelong supporter Davies wrote off a massive £170million, the club were still unable to pay tax owed, or their overheads, forcing them to sell assets such as their training ground (to Wigan Athletic).

Matters have thankfully stabilised on and off the field.

Bolton are in the third tier, pushing for a second promotion in three seasons and averaging a very healthy 17,000 for home games under popular manager Ian Evatt.

Life is never going to be easy for Bolton with Manchester’s two giants on the doorstep, while Greater Manchester, with its population of 2.6 million, also has professional clubs based in Wigan, Rochdale, Oldham, Stockport, Salford and Altrincham.

And within an hour’s drive of Manchester you’ve got Everton, Leeds, Liverpool (Premier League), Blackburn Rovers, Burnley, Blackpool, Huddersfield Town, Preston North End, Stoke City (Championship), Accrington Stanley, Fleetwood Town, Morecambe, Port Vale (League One), Bradford City, Crewe Alexandra, Tranmere Rovers (League Two), Wrexham (fifth-tier National League), Chester (sixth-tier National League North) and Macclesfield FC, who are starting over in the 10th tier after Macclesfield Town’s demise in 2020.

There’s not an area in world football with so many professional football clubs in such proximity, but Bolton’s history is a proud one. They’ve won as many FA Cups as Leicester City, Leeds, Southampton and Derby County put together.

Bolton won’t be winning it again this season, having been knocked out at home to fellow League One side Barnsley last month, but they can still go back to Wembley in March in the Papa Johns — if they can overcome the youngsters of a club they’ve got little love for.

(Top photo: Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

 

 

 

 

Edited December 13, 2022 by gonzo

[Mounts Kipper]

47 minutes ago, radcliffe white said:

Wonder if those so against this game will have a cheeky watch on tv

I’m against it but will watch on tv. 

[desperado]

Strong side

[desperado]

                       Trafford 

          Jones    Aimson   Iredale 

bradley.        Lee.    Morley.      Sadlier

                        Kachunga 

                 Charles.       Dapo

[radcliffe white]

Should be smashing a few in 

[RUREADY2ROLL]

That side looks stronger than Saturday 

[jeep]

8 minutes ago, radcliffe white said:

Should be smashing a few in 

Definitely...

Half n half scarf tonight?

[Jol_BWFC]

Dixon dropped. Evatt taking it seriously.

[Zico]

2 hours ago, Zico said:

With Dixon and two U23s on the bench I can see as weak a starting XI as possible (6 weekend starters plus 4 u23s?) And more u23s on the bench to come on early 

Assuming the squad is being stretched, which Saturdays bench suggested  

 

couldn't have been more wrong

[Zico]

5-0

[Tonge moor green jacket]

A very attack minded line up, without anyone forward of the defence who you'd say will put some tackles in.

All or nothing really, and quite understandable that MJ only on the bench. Without Thomason and Dempsey, we need to keep him wrapped up for the league.