Bolton not yet home and dry

Hi everyone,

It’s getting to the business end of the season now and it’s all to play for. We ended last season on 37 points and now, with four games left, we’ve already got 37 on the board. We don’t feel safe from relegation yet though, not at all. We still have a job to do to get ourselves to safety.

We are, without doubt, in a much better position than we were in last year but you never know what could happen to the teams in and around us, in football anything can happen and we don’t want to get dragged down there. If you look back at last season, we scrapped for our lives and put together a run of five games without defeat, ending with a 1-1 draw against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. I think that was a one-off and we have to be sure that we’re not in that position again. The key thing is not to relax, there is still a long way to go.

We got a point out of the 1-1 draw with Aston Villa last week but to be honest I thought it could have been more. It was a hard-fought game and overall I thought we were better and the team in control. They scored from a crossed shot, it was a weird goal to be honest. But we got ourselves back in the game and managed to come away from it with a point.

It was a good strike from Tamir (Cohen) to get the equaliser, he’s been getting his head down in training and working really hard and his goal was well taken. He’s another good left-footed player here at Bolton and good luck to him, he might start a few more games now but it’s the manager’s decision who plays at the end of the day.

We’ve got Wigan, Sunderland, Hull and Manchester City in the run-in but we haven’t set any targets for what we’d like to take from those games. It’s the old cliché but it’s true – we are just taking each game as it comes. You really can’t look too far ahead, you just have to focus on one game at a time and see what each fixture throws up.

People always say that they want to reach the 40 point mark and so would we. To do that we only need one more win but we’d like to take a lot more points than that and win them all.

It starts with Wigan on Saturday - it’s a local derby and you always want to win those games. They had been flying for a while but their form has stuttered of late. They have conceded 10 goals in their last three games and that’s a big shot in the arm for us. Especially when we scored four and three goals against Middlesbrough and Chelsea respectively in recent weeks.

Last time we played Wigan there wasn’t a lot in it to be honest, they won 1-0 but it was just through an Amir Zaki penalty, not through open-play. As I said, we’re boosted by the fact we’ve found the back of the net so much recently and we know we need at least one more win to survive, so we’ll be going for it. Both teams are more or less in the same position so I’d imagine a bit of a battle to secure the points.

Bye for now! Jlloyd