It's perhaps best to start with a confession. It's wrong, I know, but I really hope we don't win anything this season.

I'll be spending the next 10 months working in China and then travelling in the rest of south east Asia, and if we win something - even if it's only the Carling Cup - I don't want to be telling my grandchildren in years to come that I spent the day following events from an internet cafe on the other side of the world, surrounded by Chinese people who couldn't understand why I was dancing on the tables.

A couple of disappointing exits from the cups and a nice sixth-placed finish in the Premiership to get back into Europe will do nicely for me, thanks very much.

I left for China two days after the Charlton game at the end of August, frustrated that my first and last match of the season had ended in defeat and that the only thing I'd seen Nicolas Anelka do in the name of Bolton Wanderers was wave to the fans when we (somewhat prematurely, I fear) sung his name.

I'm not entirely convinced that Anelka will still be around by the time I get back, but at least when non-Wanderers fans ask me who our record signing is I no longer have to utter the words "Dean" and "Holdsworth".

The trouble with trying to follow football from China is that you can't just soak up all the news by osmosis, you actually have to make the effort.

The local TV station here in Dalian, the city on the north-east coast near Korea where I will spend the next six months teaching English, shows live games over the weekend, but there's nowhere near the same attention to detail when it comes to analysis, commentary and general gossip. Even if there was I wouldn't have a clue what they were talking about.

There's also no guarantee that they'll be showing the match you want, as I found out to my cost when I set my alarm clock for 3am to watch the Portsmouth game, only to be greeted by the test card.

Perhaps the local TV bosses had heard about Big Sam's starring role in Panorama (funny how that news took almost no time to reach me via several gloating emails), but either way it was nearly another 24 hours before I found out about the 1-0 win, which by the way was further proof that whatever Sam has or hasn't done, nobody can ever accuse him of having neglected his mission to establish us as a Premiership club.

At least people in China like football. ln fact Dalian is football mad. Most of the city's major squares and parks are decorated with giant footballs in homage to the local club, Dalian Shide, who have dominated the Chinese league for several years and who produced Sun Jihai, now of Manchester City.

Yet I will not be adopting Dalian as my Chinese team, mainly because their success means people keep telling me, "they're the Manchester United of China" - and that would just be immoral.

My usual response - and how I revel in it - is that as United hardly win anything anymore, it's no longer a valid comparison.

Therefore I'll be adopting Wuhan Guanggu as my Chinese team, for no other reason than they signed a deal with Bolton earlier this year to help promote football in China.

Mind you, if that deal was supposed to have increased the team's profile in the world's most populated country, so far the revolution is yet to hit Dalian.

A straw poll of my students (completely unscientific, of course) revealed that while many of them have heard of Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea, only one had heard of Bolton, and even then I had to correct him when he kept repeating the letters JJB.

I told him that's Wigan, but I'm not here to teach you swear words . . .

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