Bolton Review

Edgar Davids Joined : 06 Jun 2007 Posts : 3552

Guardian Unlimited writers' prediction: 13th Odds: 500-1

The eight-year Lord Mayor's Show is over. So now what? Nobody really knows, which provokes slight excitement but mostly fear, because Bolton are stepping into the unknown - or, rather, the known, as outside of the Sam Allardyce years they have been a mediocre side since the days when Nat Lofthouse was allowed to barge goalkeepers into the net and claim a goal. The nagging fear is that, be it this year, next year or in 10 years, Bolton are on the path back whence they came.

Bolton without Allardyce is like Radiohead without Thom Yorke, the Sopranos without James Gandolfini, Soccer Saturday without Jeff Stelling. Not even Daniel Craig could fill these shoes. Which makes Sammy Lee's decision to take this as his first management job braver than it might seem. Lee has an outstanding coaching pedigree, but even this is a double-edged sword: expertise in one field means that, as with his spiritual predecessors Brian Kidd and Les Reed, he could easily be pigeonholed as a specialist coach and no more if his first job does not go according to plan.

At least Little Sammy is not trying to be Big Sam Mk2.0. Allardyce's formula for success was so precise that, like a pretty boy's hair, not a single integer could afford to be out of place without wrecking the whole thing. So Lee has started from scratch: their pre-season suggests 4-1-2-3 may be replaced with 4-4-2, and that he will drag - or be seen to drag, for Bolton's football was never that distasteful - the club's style of play into the 20th and maybe even the 21st century.

His work in the transfer market, however, does not inspire complete confidence: Gavin McCann, a selfless supporting actor as reliable as William H Macy, was a really good piece of business, and Christian Wilhelmsson has a very good pedigree, but Heidar Helguson (seven league goals from open play in 57 games at Fulham) and the once-promising Jlloyd Samuel (just five games for Aston Villa last season) look dubious. Then again, so did many of Allardyce's signings before he rubbed his healing hands all over them.

Lee also inherited some very good players, of course. El Hadji Diouf and Nicolas Anelka are class acts, the two Kevins, Davies and Nolan, might be in the England squad under less media-conscious management, and Ivan Campo is one of the Premiership's better deep-lying midfielders. On the flip side, their defence looks very weak after the loss of the immaculate Tal Ben Haim, and fans are being told by the tabloids every morning that they are about to lose their best striker, Anelka.

As a consequence their prospects are harder to appraise than any other side (with the possible exception of Sunderland). They could feasibly finish anywhere between sixth and 18th. The precedent of Charlton and Leicester, serial top-half overachievers who lost their long-term manager and were relegated within a year or two, looms large. But not as large as the spectre of Big Sam.

In: Gavin McCann (£1m), Jlloyd Samuel (free), Gerald Cid (undisclosed), Blerim Dzemaili (undisclosed), Zoltan Harsanyi (undisclosed), Danny Guthrie (season-long loan), Christian Wilhelmsson (season-long loan).

Out: Tal Ben Haim (free), Henrik Pedersen (released), Quinton Fortune (released), David Thompson (released), César Martín (released).