Bolton Wanderers 1 - Ipswich Town 2

Gartside should apologise to the fans for the dreadful mess created by Coyle under his stewardship, yesterday underlined the failings across the squad Coyle assembled. Fans need to drop the romance and accept K.Davies is an expensive waste, the main striker is there to put chances and half chances in the back of the net, not to waste them, that is the fine difference between success and failure and largely explains why we are 18th in the league. Not to mention the fact while Juski & El Habsi work wonders for West Ham & Wigan, our 3rd choice goalie gifts the opposition goals as if santa claus is his real calling in life

"It's not the despair. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand."

Fredmad- You and John Cleese have summed up EXACTLY how I feel right now. For some reason, that defeat to Ipswich was a bigger stomach punch than the relegation. We will now find out how good a manager Dougie is...

Over and above his dreadfully knaive tactics and lack of motivational abilities Coyle was allowed to systematically sell off and remove the few quality players we had, far worse he then was allowed to spend millions on players with little more than 2nd class ability. Think back a mere 18 months, we had Juski with El Habsi as reserve, Cahill & O Brian, Elmander & Vaz Te, none of these were costing us anything other than wages. Today you would be looking at a collective transfer budget of £20 million to bring in similar talent, maybe another £4-5 million for improved wages might have kept Cahill & Elmander here, but we would probably now still be in the prem and the lost revenue for this season and next has cost us £100 million, assuming we get back inside another 18 months, something I fear might not happen. Thus, One manager who sucked up to Gartsides vision has literally singlehandedly destroyed the present and the future tha Big Sam created for us. Freedman at worst may need at least 2 years to rebuild the team, Saturday proved once again that miracles rarely happen, reality suggests we are unlikely to challenge for promotion this season, you cannot win games if you repeatedly fail to create and then convert goal scoring opportunities, hence my repeated calls to see better strikers given the opportunity , as has been said before on this site ' if a player is not part of the solution he is part of the problem'

We have two wins under Freedman, not one.

I acknowledge what Danfarn is saying - Cahill may have gone anyway but most BWFC fans look at the lads we showed the door to with feelings of anger directed at our incompetent management - there is no other way of explaining it when we could have Vaz Te instead of Pratley, Elmander instead of Davies, El Habsi in goal and OBrian in defence, I would welcome those alternatives, - El Habsi alone would have kept us in the prem - But all that talk is now meaningless, sure we might be in the mix next April if Freedman transforms our fortunes - Pedro1874 underlines the importance of having strikers who can hit the back of the net - goals win games, anon.

I suspect that he took Eagles off because Ipswich were, quite frankly, poo. He probably thought that Ipswich had created so few clear chances that he could trust even our own defence to see the game out and he could save Eagles a potential injury from an increasingly frustrated Ipswich midfield. Unfortunately that turned out to be wrong, but hindsight is 20/20, and it was the removal of Eagles that gave Ipswich the opportunity to get forward rather than having to sit back. You can't get every decision wrong - this was his first really bad one and as long as there aren't too many between now and May, and as long as he can tempt a decent Championship-level finisher (Glenn Murray from former club Crystal Palace, perhaps, or maybe Charlie Austin from Burnley) in January we'll still be there or thereabouts for the play-offs.