Bolton Wanderers must have been the envy of Blackburn Rovers after failed £7.5m transfer | OneFootball

The Trotters cult icon spent just one season at Ewood Park, one that few will have good memories of.

The 1990s was an incredible decade for Blackburn Rovers, and after a difficult 1990/91 campaign, they won promotion to the top flight for the inaugural Premier League season just a year later.

After a fourth-place finish in 1992/93 and second-place in 1993/94, Rovers won their first top division title in just their third year in the Premier League and hopes were high that they were going to become a dominant force in England.

However, they struggled to maintain momentum and, despite two more top seven finishes, they eventually found themselves embroiled in a relegation scrap as the decade started to come to a close.

Roy Hodgson's second season in charge of Blackburn was a disaster from the start to his premature end at Ewood Park, and the decision to spend £7.5m on a 21-year-old striker from Southampton never paid off.

Blackburn Rovers never saw the real quality of Kevin Davies

Rovers had an incredible number of injury problems during the 1998/99 season, and ultimately this led to the campaign being all about self-preservation and ensuring that their Premier League status remained intact.

Kevin Davies was signed for a colossal seven-figure fee in the summer, and there was an incredible amount of hope surrounding his arrival in BB2, having scored nine goals in 24 league games for a Southampton team that had finished 12th the year prior.

The money that was paid put a lot of pressure on his young shoulders, as both he and his new club struggled to make an impression early on.

Blackburn won just two of their opening 15 games in the Premier League, and they quickly fell behind the rest of the pack.

By the time Davies did manage to score what proved to be his one and only league goal of the season, the Lancashire outfit were bottom of the table and they needed a strong run of form to help get them out of the situation that they were in.

The Sheffield-born striker's goal against Charlton Athletic saw Rovers take just their third victory of the campaign, and it did see them go on their best run as they ran out winners on two more occasions in their next five matches, drawing the other three.

However, Blackburn could not maintain this form, and with Davies struggling to fire, they quickly lost the momentum that they had got and ended the season 19th.

Kevin Davies became a Bolton Wanderers cult hero after Blackburn Rovers struggles

With Rovers back in the second tier, their former number 10 returned to Southampton, spending three years back on the south coast before he moved to Bolton Wanderers for free.

It was in Greater Manchester where he experienced an incredible amount of success, scoring nine goals and registering nine assists in 38 Premier League games during the course of the 2003/04 season.

He continued to find the back of the net with the Trotters, and after a quiet 2007/08, he proved crucial to Bolton just a year later as he had his best campaign as a footballer, scoring 11 times to help his team to a mid-table finish.

Davies had matured into a stalwart of the top flight, and the lessons that he had learned at Blackburn 10 years earlier were clear to see as he helped his side maintain their Premier League status all the way until 2012 - he even became an England international whilst a Trotters striker, albeit only for one match in 2010 against Montenegro.

In his last season at the club, he played a full year in the Championship for the very first time as Wanderers narrowly missed out on the play-offs and a return to the promised land.

He left Bolton at the end of the 2012/13 campaign a hero, and Blackburn supporters must still wonder how it never worked out for Davies at Ewood Park after showing what he did at the Reebok Stadium for many a year.