Trotting Home - At Last Comes the Day

Author: William the White / Date: Monday 18 January 2010

We lost. Again. So what's new? Plenty, says William the White.

 

What’s changed? Still no clean sheet. Another lousy result against a ‘top four’ club. Another defeat against Arsenal – it’s now six on the run in the Premier league. And the starting line up exactly the same as the previous manager’s.

Nothing has changed, and yet, it seems, everything has.
 
This game places into perspective how bad it had been before. Looking forward to the match not sighing at the thought of it. Anticipating football not 90 slow, dull minutes of some parody of it. Hopeful not resentful. Behind the boys not on their backs. Cheers not boos. Grins not groans. A lifting of the heart not a slow seeping of the bowel.

In a word – Coyle. And not the previous manager.

And even in defeat the Reebok felt a good place to be.
 
Arsenal play good football. It’s all on the floor. It’s full of movement. It’s quick. It has variety. It’s attractive. Above all, at the beating (and sometimes cheating) heart of it is Fabregas who put them one up after they had pressed us back for fifteen minutes or so.

There was no collapse. There was a team, fighting. Cahill was steady. Zat Knight had his best game of a season that has not been rose-scented, but today he won everything in the air and managed to stay awake for 95 minutes. Steinsson came into his own in the second half.

The Wanderers had two periods of dominance – the opening of both halves and, in particular, the second. In this period, without moving into fantasy, it was possible to imagine a Bolton victory. Unfortunately three out of four highly convertible chances fell to Matty Taylor, a player seriously out of form. I don’t want him dropped. I want him scoring. He was – as it were – there to miss them.

The source of much that went well was Lee Chung Yung. The man of the match for the Whites, will be appearing in Traore’s nightmares tonight – all night long he’ll chase shadows. May he chase them again on Wednesday night.

We were defeated 2-0 at home. No one booed. The players were applauded at the end. Owen Coyle was applauded as he came on the pitch. We left. Defeated. Unbowed. In a new place. Where we felt good to be wanderers once more.

The German poet and playwright, Bertolt Brecht, wrote: The night has twelve hours, but at last comes the day. Welcome back, Owen.

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