Frank Malley

OWEN COYLE was persuasive. You had to give him that as he took over at Bolton Wanderers.
He maintained he had “never been motivated by personal money in my life” and in evidence cited turning down Celtic last summer when he could have doubled his wages.
He insisted his ambition was to stay working in the Premier League and reasoned that leaving Burnley for the Reebok Stadium was purely “a football decision”.
Yet no amount of slick answers are going to change anything.
Football tends to see things in black and white. In Burnley, as one columnist put it, Coyle will always be seen as “Judas Iscariot in a claret-and-blue scarf”. A man who betrayed those who trusted him and for whom he professed his devotion.
In Bolton they see a man who believed it was time to look after number one with the club for which once he played. A man whose creative mind and affable nature is in stark contrast to the dour image of former boss Gary Megson.
Yet Coyle might just have made the biggest mistake of his career.
At Burnley, Coyle made his reputation as a manager whose team played fluent, passing football. Not exactly the pretty patterns of Arsenal, but always with the ball on the floor.
A manager who placed value on adventure and entertainment.
That has not been the Bolton way. Not under chairman Phil Gartside, who has preferred pragmatists such as Sam Allardyce and Megson.
The one time they attempted to play football came under Sammy Lee, who was in charge for 11 matches, winning just one, before being sacked.
Bolton do not do pretty. And that is Coyle’s immediate dilemma.
The club lie third from bottom of the Premier League, two points below Burnley. They are immersed in a relegation scrap, having shipped 36 goals in 18 matches this season. They need a transfusion of resilience, ironically the very thing Coyle found elusive at Burnley, who have shipped 40 goals in 20 matches.
It is what makes Coyle’s decision so perplexing. In essence he has swapped one fragile, over-achieving club for another, albeit one which has a more established academy and better resources.
Bolton are never going to challenge the big four. They are unlikely to challenge those currently challenging the big four. They are a club still living on the over-achievement of the Allardyce era. Some might say living in a dream world.
Chief dreamer is Gartside, who really does make you wonder if former England star Len Shackleton had it right when he dedicated a chapter of his autobiography to the knowledge of football directors. It extended to a single blank page.
Gartside is the man who recommended Coyle to Burnley and now has to pay hefty compensation to get the manager he should have appointed in the first place.
This is the man who instead selected the unfortunate Megson, who was never given a chance by the Reebok Stadium fans.
This is the man who sat beside Coyle at his first press conference as Bolton manager and opened proceedings with a cringing eulogy.
“He (Megson) did a great job for us and set it up for the new man to take over,” said Gartside, and you wondered how he kept a straight face.
Such a “great job” they sacked him. Football really has no shame.
We should not be surprised.
Football is a business in which badges are kissed one minute and discarded the next. In which some managers swap jobs like most of us change shoes. In which loyalty resides only in the fans who turn up week after week.
As Coyle, who clearly believes Bolton have a better chance of survival than Burnley, put it: “You do well and you move on or you don’t and you move on.”
There is one thing, however, which lingers, defying Coyle’s powers of persuasion. A sense of betrayal.