Youri Djorkaeff played for France in a World Cup final on home soil against Brazil. But he says he has never experienced nerves like those he felt when Bolton took the field at Southampton in May 2003. West Ham, one of their rivals for relegation, had unexpectedly won at Chelsea earlier that day, sending tremors through Djorkaeff and his teammates.
A Bolton director entered the changing room. “They’ve won, they’ve won,” he said, gulping. The Bolton manager Sam Allardyce had to eject him. Allardyce’s players were fretful enough without seeing the club’s hierarchy panic.
Welcome to the unique — and for those who have to go through it — dreadful environment of a relegation battle. This year the field of conflict is more congested than it has ever been. Owen Coyle believes Bolton are involved again — indeed the Trotters’ current boss says that every team from seventh down is threatened. That’s 70% of the top flight. “We want more points because I don’t think 40 or around there will be enough this year,” Coyle says. “Right through the whole season, we’ve seen that any team can beat any team.”
With so many imperilled, it has never been more difficult to predict which sides will drop. What does seem likely is that the struggle will continue until the last day of the season with a finish to the campaign as fraught as 2004-05 when, for the only time in Premier League history, no team was already doomed to relegation going into the campaign’s final day.
It would be no surprise if, as happened in 2006-07, a side is relegated on goal difference and by a single goal. The points-per-game ratios already achieved by the bottom teams suggest Coyle is right and that more than 40 points will be needed to survive. The last, and only, time that happened in a 38-game Premier League season was in 2002-03 when Bolton did survive. Anxiously, they clung on at Southampton despite their opponents dominating and hitting the woodwork to earn a 0-0 draw and secured survival by beating Middlesbrough at home in the final round of matches.
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Celebrations were so wild that Bolton’s assistant-manager, Phil Brown, went home at 6am on a milk float. A member of Bolton’s backroom staff recalled: “The way Big Sam handled the pressure was genius. At Southampton, he calmed the players by saying, ‘All we need to do today is not lose and then destiny will be in our hands on the last day’.
“You learn a lot in a relegation scrap. One is to respect the value of a point. Another is the importance of keeping players’ heads clear, ensuring everything about day-to-day life at the club remains positive.
“You also need to identify which players are going to handle the situation best and the types you generally want are either experienced ones, who know how to cope with pressure, or young ones who don’t understand what pressure is. And it’s no bad thing for players to be selfish. That instinct, ‘I don’t want relegation to happen to me’, is what’s going to keep you up.”
How else do you escape the drop? This year’s endangered clubs could start by heeding some of the Premier League's previous great escapes.
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West Brom became the first Premier League club to cheat relegation after occupying last place in the table at Christmas and Kevin Campbell, signed from Everton in January 2005, was their talisman.
“Bryan Robson [the West Brom manager] said, ‘Kev, I want you to come here and help change the mentality’. It took him 45 seconds to convince me to sign. It was all about the challenge. He said, ‘I know you’ve been a top player, but here’s a challenge like you’ve never attempted before’, and that hooked me.
“He made me captain and signed Kieran Richardson and Richard Chaplow [from Burnley]. They were good buys. Kieran was on the fringes with Manchester United and it was Richard’s first crack at the Premier League and they had something to prove. There were strong players at the club — Darren Moore, Geoff Horsfield, Paul Robinson and Jonathan Greening — and we clicked.
“First we had to get rid of the defeats from players’ minds. The team had been getting beaten all season and people were taking bad results into the next game. Nobody gave West Brom a chance. As an Everton player, I’d watched them on Match of the Day and said, ‘They’re down’. We made a lot of people eat a lot of humble pie — that became a motivation.
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“Early on I made a speech. I said to the lads, ‘You’ve got such a fantastic opportunity here. How many players get the chance to make history? You might never get the chance to do it by winning titles but you can make history by staying up’. The last day was weird, with the crowd cheering then going quiet because of what was happening at other games, and at half-time it was 0-0 and we had to remind everyone, ‘We need goals here. If we go down because other teams win, fine, but if we don’t do our bit and win ourselves, how bad will we feel?’
“People talk about pressure at the top — there ain’t no pressure at the top. ‘Pressure’ there is nice, it’s to win trophies. At the bottom, it’s desperate. Real pressure. Players need to be professional, strong. I remember the sheer elation of surviving like it was yesterday. It’s the greatest achievement of my career. It felt better than winning the title with Arsenal, better than winning the FA Cup, better than winning the Cup Winners’ Cup.”
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Coyle left Burnley to answer an SOS from Bolton last January and, after his first game in charge, a defeat by Arsenal, the club were second bottom. He turned results round and Bolton survived by nine points. “What’s really important is making sure your players are positive and upbeat, and winning games against the teams around you.
“The old cliche is that those games are six-pointers but they really are. Also, while you have your beliefs about how you want football to be played, when you want to stay in the league sometimes you’ve got to sacrifice performances for points. We came in at a difficult time with Bolton in the bottom three and confidence low. We had to address things quickly but there was no money, so we got Stuart Holden for free and both Vladimir Weiss and Jack Wilshere on loan.
“We felt we had to get some footballers into the team and all our signings were youngsters — young players have no preconceptions and bring tremendous energy and enthusiasm to a team.
“Jack would take the ball when he had a man on him and older players would say, ‘Hey, if he’s brave enough to do it, I should be too’.
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“He helped me remove the fear factor, which a manager must do. You’ve got to get through to the players: don’t worry about things not coming off, think about the rewards when they do come off, the prize of avoiding relegation.
“But three points in the Barclays Premier League is a massive achievement any time — at this stage even more so.”
