Inside Bolton’s dramatic reconstruction: the club abandoned Pep-Ball in pursuit of the promotion while the former Premier League club seeks to escape after four years in the third level

The Seagulls howl in the empty stadium of Blackpool, the rain is getting rid of, and the director of Bolton visiting is under the shelter of the main roof, trying to rationalize the defeat, the painful gaze in his eyes betrays the agonies attached to the realization of the big sides of the club of England in the second.

Five years ago, Bolton did not even expect to be in a place like this. The players of their team have exhausted themselves in the nameless shirts of sponsor on the front, taken directly from the rail at the club store because they had money to all the companies with which they had worked. Their staff counted on food banks.

The club’s descent, after playing catastrophically on players to extend ten uninterrupted years in the Premier League, brought them to bankruptcy and three places from the bottom of the Ligue two.

However, you cannot bury a fans base. The city sent 32,000, a tenth of its entire population, to Wembley for the final of Ligue 1 in May last May and they are back in similar numbers all season, despite this breaking defeat against Oxford United.

There were 25,000 for the home match against Birmingham, 22,000 for the arrival of Lincoln City, 20,000 for Peterborough. The panels on the approach of the city of the old mill tell the story. “Welcome to Bolton,” they say. “Bolton Wanderers house.

The football road is rarely linear. The matches are not won over the feeling and when the push of progress stained this season, there was the surrealist spectacle of a massive resistance to a football brand Pep Guardiola.

The manager Ian Evatt was a disciple PEP, who had been good while he lasted, but in the middle of a wish of something more useful and less heavy, an ironic song was installed. “On the side and back, wherever we go.

Evatt, a fundamental part of Bolton’s revival, separated the club’s company in February. The emotions he still wore on his round did not serve him well when fans of the club expressed their frustration while the team dragged half-time against Cambridge.

Into the Shoes ‘Evo’ wore for four years put Steven Schumacher, providing more composed behavior and less servile devotion to PEP 3-5-2.

The players who seemed lost, such as the Josh Dacres-Cogley file and midfielder Aaron Morley, were restored. Stronger John McATEE – The “White Pele” while the Bolton contingent of 2,000 people cut in the corner outside of Blackpool described him on Saturday – seems to be invigorated.

Thursday of last week, the Blackpool match was Bolton’s speech.

“This manager brought an elevator,” said Alf Smithton, at Chetham Arms Pub in Turton, opposite the cemetery where the ashes of the legendary Nat Lofthouse of the club were dispersed. “There was a new momentum. There are a lot about this game, the mind. We didn’t think we would need the playoffs to go up this time. Now it’s touching and off you go.

The successive defeats of Bristol Rovers and Stockport, shredding the series of five Schumacher victories in six undefeated championship games, lent a nervous. Defensive errors are concern. Only four teams have fewer clean sheets than Bolton, who have not won Blackpool since December 1977.

The most obvious historical resonance of the lighting – the Matthews ” final of 1953, in which Stan Mortensen of Blackpool marked a hat -trick to beat Bolton at the FA Cup in Wembley and yet was still overshadowed – is not the only one.

Blackpool fans remember the 17 -year -old man in their issue that was stabbed when problems broke out before the teams met in Bloomfield Road in August 1974. No one was never charged. Blackpool fans still launch this in Bolton on occasion.

On this occasion, they launch the name of Evatt, a popular blackpool player for six years, with a visit contingent and when the game starts, Bolton looks anxious.

Defenders Chris Forino and Captain George Thomason and Morley all overthrow possession in their own half. Blackpool is just ten minutes ahead thanks to Ashley Fletcher, who, as a boy, scored 150 goals for the Bolton teams at the Academy before Manchester United came.

Bolton began to find a threat, thanks to the combination of McATEE and Hungarian international Szabolcs, Schon, who both arrived last summer while Bolton spent to return to the championship this time. No one broke the bank to obtain them.

The risks of speculation to accumulation are like a shadow on the Bolton wall. But the club has additional donors, five years old by their rescue by the community consortium Ventures (FV) community, led by businesswoman Sharon Brittan.

Nick Luckock’s brother, one of the members of the FV consortium, is a trafigura framework, the world supplier of goods, minerals and oil -based oil. Ben Lucock persuaded 25 families who work in the multinational to become co-investors from Bolton.

In the raw cold of Bloomfield Road, some of the old “lateral and back” habits seem difficult to break for Bolton, which hesitates to risk a line of line. But an equalizer – Dacres -Cogley throwing a bullet for Morley to measure a delicious cross that Aron Collins converts – highlights a belief.

Bolton turns into a dominant strength of the game, flooding half of Blackpool. The lateral rear Jordi Osei-Tutu, a unique trainee from Arsenal, should mark with a ball that Thomason rolls on his way. Forkin drives closely wide with the right step of 20 meters. The part-time whistle saves Blackpool.

There are dark mumbles at halftime of those of Bolton’s persuasion about the way the team will surely conceded again, as they often do, and therefore it happens around the hour. A little more intensity in the midfield and a 20 yarn ball would not have been sent to the Nial Ennis of Blackpool.

A little less space between the central defenders of Bolton and Ennis would not have shot on the goalkeeper Nathan Baxter. The reverse requires Bolton to launch the house at Blackpool. They cannot invoke intensity. There is chances but no significant taxation. Bolton does not have an out -of -stay attacker.

Schumacher takes a while to emerge at the end of all this.

“ It is perhaps the eighth or the ninth time that we have had 70% possession ”, he says Sport Mail As the rain crosses the ground in front of him.

“Now that’s just what you do with possession. Just keeping the ball for itself and making 600 passes and without penalties, I would not be satisfied with this, but we had 15 shots on goal today, far from my home.

His own ambitions are also at stake here. He has housed them since he was captain of England under 19 and a member of the Everton team, with Wayne Rooney in his ranks, who reached the FA Youth Cup 2002 final.

“I failed to play in the Premier League, but I always had the ambition that I wanted to be a coach, so I will rather arrive at the Premier League in this way,” he said on the club’s program before the home match with Crawley. It was not an ordinary interview.

He describes how he exploited his own knowledge of promoting the promotion to the championship, which he made in Plymouth two seasons behind, during his presentation to his players last Thursday.

“The last nine games in Argyle started with us losing 4-0 in Wembley,” he said, referring to the final defeat of the FA trophy against Bolton. “Then we happily won in Morecambe and we were beaten on Easter Monday at Lincoln and everyone said that the wheels had fallen. We did not panic. We stood at the plan that had put us in position. We have won the last six on the spin and have been promoted champions. I told the players, “There are nine games to do. If you lose one, don’t worry. Just stay in terms of.”

It is actually only eight games now and the pips will climb, with one from Bolton, Reading, Huddersfield and Orient likely to grasp the last barrage point. The next step for Bolton on Tuesday is another local derby in Wigan, where they have not won since 2011, when the two games were in the Premier League together.

‘Once. Never left ”, says the message that the club uses to promote subscriptions for next season and that does not seem exaggerated. Outside Saturday, Dion Charles, the Bolton striker, sold Huddersfield in January.

He is currently injured, although his decision did not impress Huddersfield fans because their teams were beaten in Charlton. The chances seem to be against promotion and it seems that another year of League One, but 16,000 of these season tickets for the next campaign have already been sold.

Where there is life, there is hope. It has always been with Bolton.