EPL Previews: Stupid Fucking Bolton

Why do I loathe Stupid Fucking Bolton so much? Maybe it’s because they aren’t bad in the way that say Birmingham or Reading were last year, lacking in talent but scrappy and kind of endearing. No, Bolton are just plain crap, built around all of those leftover Sam Allardyce tactics, grinding out nil-nil draws, gaining against-the-run-of-play goals and hanging onto the English Premier League (suck it Barclays) by their fingernails. That lovely eleven-men-behind-the-ball, push the opposition around and punt it up the field in the hopes of a poached goal. In other words, utter and total crap!

If there were any justice in this world, Stupid Fucking Bolton would have been relegated last year, and they ought to be relegated this year. But unfortunately there’s a decent chance that -- yet again -- there will happen to be three teams that are even more incompetent. So, Stupid Fucking Bolton will likely be rewarded for their crap tactics, and will keep going on year after year, like the plague, or Survivor.

Join me after the jump for more spleen-emptying...

How else can you react to a team that last year sold it’s best player and only real scoring threat, even if he has a penchant for that stupid bird celebration, and then fielded a weakened squad in the UEFA Cup against Sporting Lisbon so they could instead concentrate on barely surviving the Premier League? In other words, a team that sacrificed the opportunity to earn a rare trophy for piddling league mediocrity? A team that fired that Fat Walrus and still stinks? A team that will be relying on new boy Johan Elmander, who will simultaneously have to adjust to the English game and thus has a good chance to be a bust? A team that unloaded El Hadji Diouf, who is loathsome but at least gave the team some sort of identity? Actually, unloading El Hadji Diouf was a positive move, but trust me, it’s still crap somehow. It just has to be.

Don’t believe me, just look at the hostility displayed in the comments on the Guardian’s preview page.

Next season will be the 70th season that Stupid Fucking Bolton will be in the English top flight without winning the title (going out a limb and predicting that it won’t happen next season). They haven’t won a major trophy since the FA Cup in 1958. (I know, I know... thanks Wikipedia!) And yet Stupid Fucking Bolton are supposed to be one of the Big Clubs in England, a team that managed to twice qualify for the UEFA Cup in the past few years. A team that has a nice new stadium, even if it is fairly tiny, and even worse is in Bolton, not exactly populous and not exactly posh.

Best Friends!
So where was I? Ah yes.... Truly, if any team deserves the drop, it’s Stupid Fucking Bolton. Give me that truly scrappy team up from the Championship instead, a Wigan or even a Sunderland or Stoke, happy to be there and willing to go for it, you know, positively.

Just not Stupid Fucking Bolton. I don’t care about a well-organized defense. I want to see abysmal failure from the start of the season, Megson fired in December, locker room fights, catastrophic injuries, blown opportunities to win games down the stretch, pestilence, locusts, first born sons, the works! Just not another season of Stupid Fucking Bolton in the Premier League. Is that too much to ask?