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Hello, I Must Be Going!

Dave Bowler

3/27/08

Dear Sir,
I don’t care to belong to any organisation that will accept me as a member.
Love,
Groucho Marx

That was how the great Groucho Marx turned down the offer of membership of an exclusive Hollywood club. He might just as well have been writing on behalf of Bolton Wanderers and their place in the UEFA Cup. At least the monogram remains the same.

There are those that will tell you that the football season is building to a crescendo and that beyond the top three who are fighting it our for the Premier League crown, there are still plenty of teams getting extraordinarily excited at the prospect of qualifying for a place in next season’s UEFA Cup.
Oh really?

Because if you look at the way that certain teams have approached their involvement in the UEFA Cup this term, you would come to the conclusion that in fact, it’s nothing but a right nuisance that’s infinitely more irritating than the Carling Cup - after all, in the Carling Cup, the worst that can happen is you have to go to Carlisle where in Europe, you might finish up to your Ukraine in travelling. And then your bloated squad - getting more bloated thanks to the huge injection of UEFA dollars that you get for taking part - is too stretched to be able to take on the next fixture on the following Sunday.

In such circumstances, you don’t need to be a tactical genius, or the Bolton manager, to conclude that you must immediately play a team of reserves in Europe’s second biggest club competition, chuck in your chances of winning, waste all the money your supporters have spent on travelling to see you and, essentially, bare your backside in derision to what, for 40 years, has been one of the great ambitions of any side in the land - to play in Europe.

Bolton are by no means the only offenders, but they are comfortably the worst. Their deliberate surrender to Sporting Lisbon in the round of 16 in the UEFA Cup was about as far from the spirit of competition as you can get, the kind of thing that should mean them not being allowed to compete in the competition again - although to be fair, the Trotters already seem to have that side of the bargain under control.

Justice of the poetic kind was dished out on the following Sunday when they lost to ten men Wigan and slumped into the bottom three of the Premier League, from where Europe seems a long way away.

Nobody will deny that survival in the Premier League is pretty much the be all and end all for a lot of clubs breathing that rarefied air but is that really the way to do it? And if it is, shouldn’t UEFA simply take one of those UEFA Cup places away from the English league and give it to a country that actually wants it?

The lunacy of not giving European competition your best shot is just extraordinary. Although this year’s FA Cup competition has allowed fresh faces a shot at actually winning a trophy, we all know that for the bulk of the clubs in this country, qualifying for Europe is just about the pinnacle. That’s what club after club sets as their aim at the start of the season - a good cup run and qualifying for Europe.

But what’s the point of qualifying if, once you get there, you treat the competition with contempt? Last season, Bolton slogged away over 38 games to finish high enough in the league to qualify. From there on, they seemingly did everything they could to get knocked out as swiftly as possible, only to somehow come through the group stages and the first knockout phase. Why qualify for something you don’t want to take part in? You might as well qualify for Wimbledon, though the concept of Ivan Campo swanning about on the Centre Court is all a little too frightening to dwell upon, especially if you are the groundsman.

All of that said, there’s still room for a little understanding for Bolton’s plight. So obscenely skewed are the finances of English football that failure to stay in the top flight is pretty much the same as taking a loaded revolver into the drawing room and not coming out again. Relegation for Bolton could inflict a mortal wound that might take years to recover from. There are few people who enjoy losing less than Gary Megson - very, very few - but such is the position at the bottom of the Premier League that he’s willing to sacrifice one game in the hunt for winning a different one. While it’s hard to condone their cavalier attitude to something as important as the UEFA Cup, the more pressing question remains with the Football Association.
When the hell are we going to level this playing field?

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