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Next Game - Bolton Wanderers (home)

Last updated : 30 July 2002 By Tony Scholes

Jay-Jay Okocha
Both clubs can be pleased with the progress made since we last met and it is just two years ago that we were looking forward to a trip to the Reebok for our first game back in the First Division after a five year absence. We turned in a good performance that day but I’m not sure many Clarets there would have thought we would be involved in successive attempts at making the play offs.

Bolton themselves did reach the play offs in that 2000/01 season and beat Preston to reach the Premiership for the third time but perhaps the greatest achievement of all came last season when for the first time in those three attempts they succeeded in avoiding the drop and comfortably in the end by four points.

It is worth looking back at the two line ups from that August day in 2000 when we won a point after an excellent second half performance;

Bolton Wanderers: Jussi Jasaskelainen, John O’Kane (Leam Richardson), Gudni Bergsson, Mark Fish, Per Frandsen, Bo Hansen (Ian Marshall), Gareth Farrelly, Anthony Barness, Simon Charlton, Franck Passi, Isaiah Rankin.

Burnley: Paul Crichton, Paul Weller, Mitchell Thomas, Steve Davis, Ian Cox, Lee Briscoe, John Mullin (Glen Little), Kevin Ball, Paul Cook, Andy Cooke (Graham Branch), Phil Gray.

Five of the thirteen Bolton players are no longer with the club, these are O’Kane, Fish, Marshall, Passi and Rankin whilst six of the Burnley team have since moved on in Crichton, Thomas, Mullin, Ball, Cooke and Gray.

Kostas Konstantinidis
There are certainly some interesting new faces at Bolton. Last season manager Sam Allardyce made extensive use of the loan system and over the season the Reebok Stadium saw players such as French defender Bruno N’Gotty from Marseille, Fredi Bobic from Borussia Dortmand and Kostas Konstantinidis from Hertha Berlin.

N’Gotty eventually signed permanently as did Frenchman Youri Djorkaeff from Kaiserslautern. The Djorkaeff deal was a short term deal but he has now signed again for the new season.

Djorkaeff is not the only new signing over the summer though with three further new players added to the squad. The first of these was Jay-Jay Okocha the Nigerian midfielder whose last appearance was for his country against England in the World Cup.

Next came Delroy Facey from Huddersfield, perhaps surprising, but after the success of Michael Ricketts who is to question Allardyce’s signings of lower division strikers. The last signing is Turkish midfielder Bulent Akin who has come in from Galatasaray. Allardyce still intends to use the loan market and already Bernard Mendy has arrived on such a deal from Paris Saint-Germain.

But what sort of squad will be at the Turf, apparently it will be the full first team squad so we can expect to see a number of the foreign imports on the field for Bolton.

It is the only home friendly this time round with just a short trip to Bury to follow before the season starts.

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