Bolton Wanderers and the £120m last day gamble against Blackpool

After dropping out of the Premier League, Bolton had approached the Championship with a degree of hubris that would come back to haunt them.

The club had made little contingency for the drop in revenue, which would later surface in the biggest single losses ever seen to that stage outside the top-flight in a set of financial accounts.

Eddie Davies had doubled down on Owen Coyle’s ability to get the Whites straight back up, and sanctioned some big contracts such as Keith Andrews, Andy Lonergan and a £2m-plus move for Leicester City’s Matt Mills.

While some big earners were shed – Ivan Klasnic, Gretar Steinsson, Ricardo Gardner, Jussi Jaaskelainen, Paul Robinson and Nigel Reo-Coker among them – the squad carried into the 2012/13 season still had a whopping £37.4m wage budget, by far the biggest in the division.

Coyle’s team looked woefully under-prepared as they lost on the opening day against his former club Burnley at Turf Moor, and were no more impressive in drab defeats at Hull, Birmingham or, finally, Millwall. Two days into an international break and with the manager scheduled to do an interview with Sky Sports on how he intended to turn things around, owner Davies pulled the trigger.

Coyle – incredibly – still went through with the interview, albeit he was forced to do so wearing a club training jersey with the badge taped over. The bleak vignette sounded very much like a man reading his own eulogy.

Club legend Jimmy Phillips was promised a shot at the job and looked to have given himself a reasonable chance with a 3-2 win against Bristol City. Yet between that result on October 20 and the final whistle of a 2-2 draw at Wolves three days later, clandestine talks with Crystal Palace’s young boss Dougie Freedman had been successful.

The scorned Eagles even announced the deal the just minutes before Phillips – furious to say the least – was due to talk to sum up the game to the local press.

A Selhurst Park favourite from his playing days, Freedman had led Palace to the top of the table with smaller resources as an exciting young squad, including the likes of Yannick Bolasie and Wilfred Zaha.

The Scot did not care for the culture he had inherited at Bolton, and quickly went about changing things to his satisfaction, which was not without its casualties.

Staff at the academy were told they no longer had parking spots at Euxton and were to operate on an invitation-only basis. There would be clear delineation between ‘staff’ and ‘players’ at the training ground too, and the squad was given strict guidelines on the use of phones, social media and even the way they greeted each other in the morning.

Freedman felt his approach would bring about a more professional environment, others would argue it sterile, but there is little doubt that he improved results and by the turn of 2013, Bolton had started to climb back up the table.

The first fluttering of budgetary problems occurred in the January window, where Wanderers had to make a quick disposal of Martin Petrov’s wages to enable the manager to bring in players like Craig Davies and Medo Kamara, both of whom would be key men in the revival.

Club captain Kevin Davies would be another high-profile victim, and despite strong words of advice to the contrary from the in-house PR team, the rather cold-blooded way Freedman pushed him to the periphery created some major headlines.

Nevertheless, Wanderers went into the last day of the season knowing a win against mid-table Blackpool would be enough to guarantee a play-off spot, and as one of the Championship’s form teams to boot.

They would have to do it without Craig Dawson, the centre-half who had been a lucky charm and an unexpected source of goals following a three-month loan from West Brom. The deal, signed in January with Bolton nowhere near promotion, had simply been done to cover for David Wheater’s injury absence. Unfortunately for all concerned, Wheater was not fit enough to feature in the run-in, and it fell on Tim Ream – yet to really find his feet in a Whites shirt – to step in.

A packed-out Reebok, as it still was, expected nothing more than a win. But when the teams were read out another name leapt out.

Rob Hall, a teenage winger loaned from West Ham a few months earlier, had not played a single minute for the Whites despite getting some top billing from Freedman when he signed in February.

His inclusion in the starting line up ahead of Josh Vela or Marvin Sordell, who had both turned out the previous weekend in a 1-1 draw at Cardiff City, had everyone scratching their head.

Confusion soon turned to anger. Striker Craig Davies summed it up in his own style during a recent episode of the Under the Cosh podcast.

“They (Blackpool) had **** all to play for and the busy ***** turned up like PSG,” he said.

“Tom Ince and Matt Phillips are Neymar and Mbappe and are causing absolute ****ing carnage.

“They were going nuts. The first 20 minutes I knew we were in trouble.

“There were about 29,000 people there, it is expected to be a party, and they went 2-0 up. I was no party.

“We managed to drag it back. Chris Eagles scored and I scored about two minutes before half time but half time came at the wrong time. If we had 10 more minutes we would have won the game and got another goal.”

Hall had been hooked on 37 minutes for Sordell, after which Eagles and Davies did their thing.

Nerves set in during the second half and though there were some very presentable chances for Mark Davies, Chung-Yong Lee and Sordell, the game finished level, which would have been enough had it not been for a late, late goal at the City Ground.

Nottingham Forest had to throw everything forward to find the winner that would see them leapfrog Bolton and Leicester into the top six. But in doing so they left the back door open and Anthony Knockaert’s goal gave the Foxes – previously with just one win in 12 – an unlikely route into the play-offs.

Bolton’s party turned into a full-blown wake. Kevin Davies took a last walk around the ground on which he had enjoyed such happy times, fighting back tears as he waved to the fans.

Freedman’s big call had gone horribly wrong. Tactically, he had hoped by playing 4-4-2 with Chung-Yong and Eagles on either wing and the pacy Hall through the middle he could get behind Blackpool and turn their five-man midfield.

“I thought if we can get two in there and our front four on the ball a bit quicker then maybe we could hurt them,” said the Scot, before adding pointedly: “But it backfired on us. Some people can't act on information, so you have got to change it and maybe make it more simple.”

Freedman never regained what he had lost that afternoon. Though tactically astute, the squads he assembled from there on in either lacked the motivation or the nous to carry out a possession-based gameplan which is not too dissimilar to the one Ian Evatt prefers now.

Finances tightened further, Freedman lost out on targets he had banked upon – Dawson, Lukas Jutkiewicz, George Boyd among them – and saw talents like Marcos Alonso disappear for next to nothing.

All the while, he managed to create nothing of the togetherness that had been such a factor in the Premier League days, even under his predecessor.

“When I first went there I met him and he was a different type of character,” Craig Davies said of Freedman. “I was probably still growing up, even though I was 26 at the time.

“He was very intense. I feel he was before his time. He knew the way football was developing but his ideas have come into play after. At the time it was new, and you were like, what is this?”

Had Freedman’s tactical risk-taking paid off, the former Wales international has no doubt Bolton would have returned to the Premier League.

“Palace won the play-offs that year but we had the measure of them, we would have beaten them for sure,” he said.

Kevin Phillips scored the decisive penalty for Palace in their victory against Watford in the final, its estimated worth? Around £120million.