At number 4 in my countdown of the best Bolton Wanderers games of 2008 is…

4. Sunderland 1 Bolton Wanderers 4

Who?
A confident Bolton – three wins from their last four – against a Sunderland team in decline.

What?
Bolton come back from 1-0 down to thrash Sunderland 4-1 and put the final nail in the coffin of Roy Keane’s reign as manager.

Why?
The Wanderers capitalise on some poor defending and Johan Elmander finally shows what he’s made of with two great finishes.

Where?
Stadium of Light

When?
November 29th, 2008

You can see the top 10 Bolton Wanderers games of 2008 in full here.

If you disagree with any of my choices or have any views on the games I’ve picked, please feel free to have your say in the comment box below. I might even argue back.

- Gary Megson being named Manager of the Month for November (you can’t really argue with that, so fair play and pats on the back, but I’m still not convinced he’ll still be our manager in a year’s time).

- EPL Talk disagree with me though, they reckon Bolton are massively over-achieving this season (and with stats like 2.75 goals per away game so far it’s hard to disagree… but I’ll continue to try).

- Rumours that Megson is interested in signing Nicky Butt (great, just what we need, another one dimensional defensive midfielder).

- Danny Shittu claiming he’s done enough to get a place in the team (more like he’s seeing that Andy O’Brien is increasingly the weak link our defence).

- Ian Walker hanging up his Bolton Wanderers gloves (having only played eight non-Premier League games there’s not much you can say about this, except that the one thing that’s always annoyed me about Walker is that he’s had the same haircut throughout his entire career. Slicked back curtains are soooo 1994!).

- This piss poor attempt to stir some shit between Wanderers fans and Nicolas Anelka (and I’m sure Johan Elmander will really want to take career advice from a man who’s come close to flushing his down the toilet on several occasions).

- Sam Allardyce doing a nice bit of pre January transfer window cheerleading for Megson (it’s all about spend, spend, spend, apparently: that’s what Roy Keane thought too).

- Portsmouth fans wishing they still had Matthew Taylor.

- And finally… a big hello to Phil Gartside, who apparently likes to read Wanderers fans’ views on the internet (any chance you could say no to Nicky Butt, Phil?).

- Kevin Nolan has ‘quite literally been taking a leaf out of Roy Keane’s book,’ according to The Bolton News. Apparently he’s been reading up on the Sunderland manager (but if he really was ‘quite literally taking a leaf out of Keane’s book’, wouldn’t there be some kind of leaf extraction involved in the process? Or am I taking the phrase ‘quite literally’ a little too literally?).

- Thankfully, one man not talking literally in The Bolton News is the club doctor Jonathan Tobin. If he was then the phrase ‘we inspect them top to bottom’ in this feature about player medicals would be rather disturbing (instead, the most disturbing thing about this interview is that he appears to suggest that the transfer window deadline means Bolton don’t always have time to carry out a full medical before signing a player).

- Lots of articles about Johan Elmander this week, who appears to be enjoying his moment in the sun (as does his manager, who doubt feels somewhat vindicated). Sky Sports’ Chris Kamara is still not convinced, though, despite picking Elmander as his player of the weekend (although having watched Kamara babble and blunder his way through his commentary from the Stadium of Light on Sky’s Soccer Saturday, I’m not entirely convinced Kamara would even recognise Elmander if he walked in to him).

- The Northampton Chronicle (of all places) is among the many places that report Gary Megson’s interest in Sheffield Wednesday defender Mark Beevers. I always enjoy the Northampton Chronicle’s transfer gossip stories because they tend to produce the world’s longest headlines (and they also cover Bolton Wanderers stories that you won’t find on The Bolton News).

- Another transfer gossip story you won’t read in The Bolton News is Megson’s alleged interest in Derby’s Miles Addison… or this one about our supposed £17 million bid (yes, that’s £17m… can someone call an ambulance for Mr Gartside?) for for Standard Liege’s Axel Witsel… or rumours that Nicky Hunt might stay at Birmingham… or tittle tattle about a move for Bristol Rovers’ Rickie Lambert.

- Patronising headline of the week would go to this story about Megson abondoning long ball football in favour of the beautiful game, except I’m not sure it quite makes sense: ‘Bolton Wanderers can play for football!’ (What’s the ‘for’ there for?)

- And finally… back to Kevin Nolan, and on the same day as he said reading Roy Keane’s books (or extracting leaves from them) had taught him that scoring goals isn’t the be all and end all for midfielders, he’s also in The Bolton News saying that he needs to get back amongst the goals (go figure).

- Following his recent love-ins with Liverpool and Middlesbrough’s youth team (metaphorically, not literally, I hasten to add), Gary Megson sharing the love with Roy Keane.

- Fair play once more to the club for passing on this week’s VAT cut to the fans with a reduction in ticket prices, although this story suggests there’s still more that the club could do to improve relations with supporters.

- Evidence that you should always read beyond the first few words to get the full gist of a story, for example this Fabrice Muamba article which began: ‘Bolton Wanderer’s Fabrice Muamba will be spending time with women and girls…’ (good for him, I thought, until it turned out to be all in the name of community relations. Incidentally, the apostrophe in the wrong place is the MEN’s mistake not mine… unless I missed the story about the club changing its name to Bolton Wanderer?).

- Evidence that the culture of nepotism, initiated by Sam Allardyce when he employed his son as an agent, is still alive and well at Bolton Wanderers. The new head kit man is Ali Marland, son of long-standing club secretary Simon Marland (of course it all went a little tit’s up with Craig Allardyce – actually Andy Todd didn’t work out that well either come to think of it – so let’s hope Ali remembers not to put any red underpants in the washing machine with those white shirts).

- Our latest transfer target: Shimon Abu Hazeira.

- And finally… Kevin Nolan using the word ‘sexy’ a disturbingly high number of times in one article, either that or the Daily Telegraph was trying to get some search engine optimisation value out of the Bolton captain (clearly the search term ‘Bolton Wanderers Kevin Nolan’ isn’t bringing in enough traffic… well we can all play that game: sexy, sexy,sexy, sexy, sexy… and did I mention that I once wrote about Bolton’s red light district?).

Seen an interesting Bolton Wanderers story? Let me know in the comments below…

Roy Keane didn’t often endear himself to non-Manchester United supporters, but he certainly struck a chord with real football fans when he complained about the ‘prawn sandwich’ eating fans that have taken over the corporate boxes of Premier League football stadia in the last 15 years.

Avid readers of the club’s official newsletter, which drops into my inbox every Friday, may have noticed Wanderers’ own two-fingered salute to the prawn sandwich brigade.

Bolton Wanderers: Prawn sandwiches not welcome

The section advertising ‘Corporate Opportunities’ and ‘Hospitality Offers’ leads to two error pages on the official BWFC website… and everyone knows that when you see ‘page not found’ on the internet they might as well have written ‘fuck off, you’re not welcome here’.

Is this just a cock-up from a commercial department still reeling from finishing in the relegation zone in a league against its rival Premier League commercial departments, or is someone at the club secretly buttering up Sunderland boss Keane for if and when it goes tits up for Gary Megson this season?

And am I Bolton Wanderers fan hoping its the latter, or would that be heresy?

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