UNPREDICTABLE, emotional, constantly treading the precarious line between hero and villain...
and that’s just the 11 players on the pitch; then we come to the manager. After tempting us with the vaguest hint of consistency in the last few weeks, Wanderers lurched back towards the erratic with a 97-minute see-saw ride that left some relieved, some nauseous and some just plain annoyed. Submissive for much of the first half, rampant for most of the second, it was almost as if the club’s media team had pieced together the best and the worst bits of September and October and compiled them into a Big Brother montage.
Indeed, for the opening 45 minutes Bolton could easily have been a bunch of fame-hungry twentysomething strangers thrown into a house in the hope they do something entertaining. Already without injured number one Nathan Baxter, replacement Luke Southwood twice had to pick the ball out of his net after poorly defended corners. Some credit is due for the way they trampled the Shrews in the quarter of an hour after the restart, the words of an irate Ian Evatt evidently still ringing in their ears.
Both Kyle Dempsey and Szabi Schon deserved their goals as the two best Bolton players on the pitch. But with ample time to find a third and the sedate crowd now awake and well onside, the whole team then lost the necessary composure to take anything other than a point. On any ordinary day those transformations would have been sufficient talking points for a debate on whether.
