If you were bitten by a camel on holiday, impaled on a snorkel or had your pocket picked by a sultry siren you thought was trying to seduce you, then your summer was probably as bad as Bolton's. Big Sam may rival Big Brother in terms of media coverage but for once he has failed, unlike the latter, to attract a mildly engaging assemblage of strays, misfits and wannabes. The result is that as a new Premiership season looms, Bolton are like a heavily-pregnant skunk: about to have a stinker.
Things looked so promising back in June: their £8.5m bid for Andy Johnson suggested the Trotters were set to take a giant leap forward, graduating from expert scavengers to powerful predators capable of catching players in their prime. Then Johnson snubbed them for Everton. That set the scene for who was to come: no one. Despite being linked with Nicolas Anelka, Javier Saviola, Jan Vennegor of Hesselink, Diego Tristan, Stuttgart's Danijel Luboja, Sevilla's Ariza Makukula and Preston's David Nugent, Bolton have yet to strengthen their strikeforce. Big Sam, it seems, has money to burn, but nothing to ignite it with.
The upshot is that with the imminent departure of the half-decent Jared Borgetti, Bolton's frontline consists of barrel-chested nuisance Kevin Davies, plodsome-forward-cum-confused-leftback Henrik Pedersen, gravity-challenged waif Ricardo Vaz Te and problem child El-hadji Diouf, who, at the time of writing, is back on good terms with Allardyce after falling out with him towards the end of last season and being dropped for the final seven games. But you'd be well advised to re-check the status of that truce as soon as you get to the end of this piece.
While he's failed to find a forward, Allardyce has at least managed to attract three new midfielders. Sadly, the best of them - Didi Hamann - scarpered to Manchester City just days after rolling into the Reebok. That means Big Sam is reduced to relying on former Old Trafford steward Quinton Fortune and Everton flop Idan Tal to fill the boots of the departed Jay-Jay Okocha and Hidetoshi Nakata, both of whom may have been peripheral for much of last season but could at least provide flashes of inspiration when called upon. Looks like Kevin Nolan and Stelios Giannakopoulos are going to be asked to carry the team even more.
Allardyce's only other signing is at the back. Abdoulaye Meité was in the Ivory Coast World Cup squad but the fact is he's a sluggish centreback who couldn't even secure a place in Marseille's ramshackle defence last season. He's certainly no replacement for departed stalwart Bruno N'Gotty, nor even for Radhi Jaidi, who may have had the positional nous of a sailor in the Sahara but was at least an aerial force who plundered eight precious goals in his two seasons at the club. Allardyce could regret flogging him to Birmingham.
So it's no great surprise that Bolton lost five out of six pre-season matches. Or that Big Sam campaigned so hard to be appointed new England manager. This time last year Trotters fans were looking forward to their first ever appearance in Europe; this term the only real hope they have is that there may be three worse teams than them in the Premiership. The bookies make them 20-1 to go down; those odds look, like a Tal Ben-Haim pass from the back, far too long.
