Bolton Wanderers will fear ultimate Stockport County embarrassment again | OneFootball

Bolton Wanderers will hope to avoid the symbolism of another humiliating defeat at Edgeley Park against Stockport County this weekend.

Three years and one day since Bolton Wanderers of League One shared a 2-2 draw with Stockport County of the National League in the first round of the FA Cup, the Trotters will head to Edgeley Park to face the Hatters in a league fixture.

A week and a half after that result, newly-promoted Wanderers then made the trip from just north of Greater Manchester to just south of Greater Manchester for the replay and raced into a two-goal lead.

However, on a humbling evening for the Whites which included Antoni Sarcevic chanting negatively about the club he was captain of less than a few weeks prior before a bizarre and sudden departure, Bolton ended up losing the game by five goals to three after extra-time.

Bolton were a newly-promoted side that season with ambitions to quickly rise back through the divisions and eventually re-establish themselves in the Premier League, whilst Stockport were in their 11th successive campaign as a non-league club.

This weekend sees the teams meet in a league fixture for the first time in over 23 years and also represents a good time to take stock and evaluate the stagnation of Bolton.

Bolton's period since last Stockport meeting

In the time since Stockport’s humiliation of Bolton to proceed through to the second round of the cup, Wanderers have remained stuck in the third-tier.

At the end of that campaign, the 2021/22 season, Wanderers propelled themselves from the lower reaches of League One to ninth with an extraordinarily impressive end to the campaign.

In 2022/23, after winning the EFL Trophy with a 4-0 win over Plymouth Argyle at Wembley Stadium, Wanderers were beaten 2-1 on aggregate in the semi-finals of the League One play-offs by Barnsley.

They then played Barnsley again in the semi-finals of the play-offs a year later and won 5-4 on aggregate to move into the final, where they were comfortably beaten 2-0 by Oxford United at Wembley after a second-half to the season in which they collapsed from almost certainties for automatic promotion to missing out on the final day of the campaign.

The argument that progress has been made year upon year, but the league was much weaker last season and Bolton could only build on their 22/23 points tally by six points, whilst the likes of Derby County and Portsmouth went from outside the play-offs to the top two.

Ian Evatt had discussed his own five-year plan to be a Premier League manager and ‘hopefully’ that is with Bolton Wanderers, so, frankly, it has to be said they have stagnated.

In the meantime, Stockport won the National League and then reached the play-off final of League Two before losing to Carlisle United, but then recovered from that to eventually win the fourth-tier last season.

The clubs are now at the same level, so what was a non-league minnow knocking out four-time winners of the FA Cup three years ago, is now a game in which that non-league side can leapfrog Bolton in the League One table with a victory at Edgeley Park.

Bolton's chance to lay a marker down is high risk, high reward

Now, that possibility is a massive concern for both Bolton and Evatt after their poor start to the season that has been eased by six victories and a draw within their last eight league games since losing 4-0 at home to Huddersfield Town in mid-September.

So, whilst Wanderers will be concerned about the symbolic nature of falling below Stockport in the League One table with another embarrassment at Edgeley Park, with high risk also comes high reward.

A victory on Saturday afternoon could see Bolton move up to third in the table this weekend if results go their way and that would be absolutely astonishing, given that Bolton supporters, and even neutral observers, would be hard pushed to suggest they have played really well in more than two or three matches so far this season.

Aiming high is what Football Ventures and Evatt appeared set on doing when they took charge of Bolton in 2020, but things have stagnated and steadied with more maturity in their tone since then.

The flip-side could be damaging to Evatt’s reputation and future at the Toughsheet Community Stadium because defeat to the side that embarrassed them three years ago would put their stagnation, and even regression, into further clarity.