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Gary Megson’s supporters in the media are totally missing the point

Something’s been puzzling me for a while. Why are the media so keen to criticise Bolton fans for our treatment of Gary Megson?

In some of my previous posts I’ve suggested that it’s caused by people who have no emotional (and therefore irrational) attachment to the club finding it impossible to fully understand how Megson has undermined the spirit that has been slowly built over the last 15-20 years.

But after reading some of the reports of the latest Megson hate-in, against Stoke at the Reebok on Saturday, I’ve come up with another theory.

The Independent’s match report trotted out the usual line about Megson deserving more credit than he gets from Bolton fans, despite also saying it was a ‘dismal display’ by the Whites in the very same report.

The Bolton News described the Wanderers performance as ‘awful’, and yet still managed to blame the fans for going on a ‘witch hunt‘.

Amidst all this are the usual arguments about him keeping us up in his first season despite selling Nicolas Anelka (we’d finished 7th a year earlier), keeping us up last season (only because there were so many blody awful teams below us) and picking up four points from the last two games (against the mighty Portsmouth and Stoke). There was a good example of this on 5 Live’s 606 phone-in, according to this discussion on Burnden Aces.

The worst offender was this ridiculously over-simplisitic view given by a non-Bolton fan in the Mirror a couple of weeks ago (rightly taken to task by Vital Bolton Wanderers), which was completely undermined by the author making reference to Megson as ‘the man you once hailed as Ginger Mourinho’ (memo to outsiders: the whole Ginger Mourinho thing was never affectionate, it was always a piss-take).

The implication in all these articles is that Bolton Wanderers and its fans should not have any ambition. We should be happy to be swimming along with our heads just above the water, because that’s exactly where we deserve to be.

Well, ask yourself this, how do you think Bolton Wanderers got in to the Premier League and then Europe in the first place? Was it by having a manager who just threw his hands up and said, ‘oh well, we’re only little old Bolton, we’ve got no chance of surviving in the Premier League so why even bother trying’? No, it was by having a manger who believed that simply plodding along and accepting your place isn’t good enough.

The only way Bolton managed to eascape an existence that involved regular trips to Scunthorpe and Torquay and playing our home games at a ground with a supermarket at one end, was by believing that we deserved better; that bog standard was not good enough.

Has Gary Megson done a terrible job? No, but simply ‘not doing a terrible job’ is not good enough. I want a manager who does an outstanding job. It’s by demanding such high standards that we got where we are in the first place.

If you accept the inevitability if mediocrity, then mediocrity is all you will get.

Your views welcome in the comments below…