Inside Bolton’s dramatic rebuild: Club have ditched Pep-ball in pursuit of promotion as former Premier League club seek escape after four years in third tier

The seagulls are shrieking around Blackpool’s emptied-out stadium, the rain is sheeting down, and Bolton’s visiting manager is standing under the shelter of the main stand roof, trying to rationalise defeat, the pained look in his eyes betraying the agonies attached to the getting one of England’s great club sides back into the second tier.

Five years ago, Bolton had no expectation of even being in a place like this. Their team’s players were running out in shirts with no sponsor’s name on front, taken straight off the rail at the club shop because they owed cash to every firm they had worked with. Their own staff were relying on food banks. 

The club’s descent, after gambling catastrophically on players to extend ten uninterrupted years in the Premier League, took them to the bankruptcy courts and three places off the bottom of League Two.

You can’t bury a fanbase, though. The town sent 32,000, a tenth of its entire population, to Wembley for last May’s League One play-off final and they’ve been back in similar numbers all season, despite that shattering defeat to Oxford United. 

There were 25,000 for the home game against Birmingham, 22,000 for the arrival of Lincoln City, 20,000 for Peterborough. The signs on the approach to the old mill town tell the story. ‘Welcome to Bolton,’ they state. ‘Home of Bolton Wanderers.’

The football road is rarely a linear one. Games aren’t won on sentiment and when the push for progress stuttered this season, there was the surreal spectacle of massed resistance to a Pep Guardiola brand of football. 

They fell to a 2-1 defeat by Blackpool on Saturday, a painful setback in their play-off bid

Boss Steven Schumacher is tasked with helping one of England’s great clubs back to the top

Manager Ian Evatt was a Pep disciple, which had been good while it lasted, but amid a wish for something more purposeful and less ponderous, an ironic chant took hold. ‘Sideways and backwards, everywhere we go.’

Evatt, a fundamental part of Bolton’s revival, parted company with the club in February. The emotions he always wore on his sleeve didn’t serve him well when the club’s fans expressed frustration as the team trailed at half-time against Cambridge.

Into the shoes ‘Evo’ wore for four years has stepped Steven Schumacher, bringing a more composed demeanour and a less slavish devotion to Pep’s 3-5-2. 

Players who seemed lost, like wing-back Josh Dacres-Cogley and midfielder Aaron Morley, have been restored. Forward John McAtee – the ‘white Pele’ as the 2,000-strong Bolton contingent crammed into Blackpool’s away corner described him on Saturday – seems reinvigorated.

By Thursday of last week, the Blackpool game was the talk of Bolton. 

‘This manager has brought a lift,’ says Alf Smithton, at the Chetham Arms pub in Turton, across the road from the churchyard where the ashes of the club’s legendary Nat Lofthouse were scattered. ‘There’s been new momentum. There’s a lot resting on this game, mind. We didn’t think we would need the play-offs to go up this time. Now it’s touch and go.’

Successive defeats to Bristol Rovers and Stockport, shredding Schumacher’s run of five wins in six undefeated league games, have lent an edginess. Defensive errors are a worry. Only four teams have fewer clean sheets than Bolton, who haven’t won at Blackpool since December 1977.

The fixture’s most obvious historic resonance – the ‘Matthews final’ of 1953, in which Blackpool’s Stan Mortensen scored a hat-trick to beat Bolton to the FA Cup at Wembley and yet was still eclipsed – is not the only one. 

Niall Ennis clipped an effort over goalkeeper Nathan Baxter to restore Blackpool’s lead

Aaron Collins had climbed highest to meet a cross and glance home a header for the equaliser

Blackpool fans remember the 17-year-old in their number who was stabbed when trouble flared before the teams met at Bloomfield Road in August 1974. No-one was ever charged. Blackpool’s fans still throw that at Bolton on occasions.

On this occasion, they hurl the name of Evatt, a popular Blackpool player for six years, at the visiting contingent and when the game kicks off, Bolton look anxious. 

Defenders Chris Forino and captain George Thomason and Morley all spill possession in their own half. Blackpool are ahead within barely ten minutes through Ashley Fletcher, who, as a boy, scored 150 goals for Bolton’s academy sides before Manchester United picked him up.

Bolton begin to find a threat, through the combination of McAtee and Hungarian international Szabolcs Schon, who both arrived last summer as Bolton spent to make it back to the Championship this time. No-one broke the bank to get them. 

The risks of speculating to accumulate are like a shadow on the wall at Bolton. But the club do have additional backers, five years on from their rescue by the community-based consortium Football Ventures (FV), led by businesswoman Sharon Brittan. 

The brother of Nick Luckock, one of the FV consortium members, is an executive at Trafigura, the Swiss-based global supplier of commodities metal, minerals and oil. Ben Lucock has persuaded 25 families who work at the multi-national to become Bolton co-investors.

In the raw cold of Bloomfield Road, some of the old ‘sideways and backwards’ habits seem hard to break for Bolton, who are reluctant to a risk a line-breaking pass. But an equaliser – Dacres-Cogley laying a ball back for Morley to measure a delicious cross which Aaron Collins converts – brings out a belief. 

Bolton morph into the game’s dominant force, flooding the Blackpool half. Full-back Jordi Osei-Tutu, a one-time Arsenal trainee, ought to score from a ball Thomason rolls into his path. Forino drives narrowly wide with his right outstep from 20 yards. The half-time whistle rescues Blackpool.

Bolton have now lost their last three games, derailing Schumacher’s strong start in charge

Carlos Mendes Gomes was unable to connect with a low delivery despite bravely diving in

There are dark half-time mutterings from those of a Bolton persuasion about how the team will surely concede again, as they often do, and so it comes to pass around the hour mark. A little more intensity in midfield and a 20-yard lofted ball wouldn’t have been sent up to Blackpool’s Nial Ennis. 

A little less space between Bolton’s central defenders and Ennis would not have popped a lofted shot over goalkeeper Nathan Baxter. The setback demands Bolton throw the house at Blackpool. They can’t summon the intensity. There are chances but no meaningful imposition. Bolton don’t possess an out-and-out striker.

Schumacher takes some time to emerge at the end of it all. 

‘That might be the eighth or ninth time we’ve had 70 per cent possession,’ he tells Mail Sport as the rain rakes across pitch before him. 

‘Now it’s just about what you do with the possession. Just keeping the ball for its own sake and making 600 passes and no shots on goal, I wouldn’t be happy with that, but we’ve had 15 shots on goal today, away from home.’

His own ambitions are on the line here, too. He’s harboured them since he was an England Under-19 captain and member of the Everton team, with Wayne Rooney in its ranks, that reached the 2002 FA Youth Cup final. 

‘I didn’t manage to play in the Premier League but I always had an ambition that I if wanted to be coach, then I’m going to get to the Premier League that way instead,’ he told the club programme before the home game with Crawley. It was no ordinary interview.

He describes how he drew on his own first-hand knowledge of promotion to the Championship, which he achieved at Plymouth two seasons back, when presenting to his players, last Thursday. 

The odds seem set against promotion and it looks like another year of League One

But supporters have snapped up 16,000 season tickets for the next campaign already

‘The last nine games at Argyle began with us losing 4-0 at Wembley,’ he relates, referencing the FA Trophy final defeat to Bolton. ‘Then we won luckily at Morecambe and got beat on Easter Monday at home to Lincoln and everyone said the wheels had fallen off. We didn’t panic. We stuck to the plan that had got us into the position. We won the last six on the spin and were promoted as champions. I’ve told the players: “There’s nine games to go. If you lose one, don’t worry. Just stick to the plan.”‘

It’s actually only eight games now and the pips will squeak, with one out of Bolton, Reading, Huddersfield and Orient likely to snatch the last play-off spot. Next up for Bolton on Tuesday is another local derby at Wigan, where they haven’t won since 2011 when the two sides were in the Premier League together.

‘Once In. Never Out,’ states the message the club is using to promote season tickets for next season and that seems no exaggeration. In the away end on Saturday was Dion Charles, the striker Bolton sold to Huddersfield in January. 

He’s currently injured, though his decision didn’t impress Huddersfield fans, as their side were thrashed at Charlton. The odds seem set against promotion and it looks like another year of League One, yet 16,000 of those season tickets for the next campaign have been sold already.

Where there’s life, there’s hope. It’s always been that way with Bolton.