So, farewell then, Gary Megson: sacked by Bolton Wanderers this morning to bring to an end the most joyless, deathly and generally spirit-crushing enforced marriage in Premier League history. This is a divorce that was a long time coming and is, let's face it, probably best for everyone. No relegation or players' revolt here, just irreconcilable differences that made a five-day low-level bickering contest with your wife over Christmas that ends with an entire three-hour motorway journey passed with barely a word beyond a terse request for a glove compartment fruit lozenge look like the height of winsome uxoriousness. Sometimes you just have to move on and Megson's sacking, the fifth of his managerial career, comes as no great surprise.
Not surprising: but still undeniably harsh – and depressing too. Nobody likes to see a hounding out and this ended up being first place in an unpopularity contest which seemed to bear little relation to things like results and reasonable expectations, and instead had quite a lot to do with personal animosity and a rather grisly, bullying version of "fan power".
On the face of it Megson deserved to stay. Two seasons of defying relegation surely deserves a little loyalty around Christmas with the team showing some signs of a rally away from the bottom three. There were good signings: Gary Cahill, Matthew Taylor and Ivan Klasnic. And a single terrible one: £10m for Johan Elmander who, to be fair to Megson, is highly rated elsewhere and has been poor beyond all expectation. The home favourites, Kevin Davies and Jussi Jaaskelainen, have been retained. But still Megson has been relentlessly booed by his own fans – a level of unpopularity few managers, even the really unsuccessful ones, ever attain – and his removal demanded almost constantly. What exactly is the problem here?
Mainly the problem seems to be Gary Megson and his own incredible anti-chemistry with, not just Bolton fans but, pretty much any fans. This was an unwelcome appointment from the start. Megson finished last in a Bolton Evening News online poll of candidates (he got 1.7% of the vote behind AN Other) before being unveiled as Bolton manager. Since then he hasn't helped himself by rising to the bait. Weekly rejoinders towards the stand from the press room – prickly in defeat, patronising in victory – have become increasingly wearying. This is a man who just couldn't let things lie, who disregarded the adage that you never wrestle with a chimney sweep and instead rose to the jeers. And who, as a result, ended up ever more besmirched and grime-smeared as his ill-tempered final months ebbed away.
Lack of charm, in an age when managers are expected to seduce and perform and act as a mugging, twinkly TV face, had something to do with it then. Megson just seems to generate a great deal of unhappiness. At Nottingham Forest he consistently enraged a large section of the home support. At Leicester he was the subject of one of those season-ticket-chucking dugout incidents. It was his third game in charge. In many ways you have to admire his persistence, his Gigantosaurus-denier hide, and his simple refusal to buckle.
Other than this an innate tactical fustiness hasn't helped. Some Bolton fans were tired of his cautious tactics: a 4-5-1 formation in some home games, with Davies usually shunted to the left wing away from home. Even neutrals felt aggrieved by the reserve XI fielded in the defeat by Sporting Lisbon in the last 16 of the Uefa Cup in March 2008, for some Bolton's biggest game in 50 years. The idea was to keep the first-choice players fit for Wigan the following weekend. They lost that one too.
Still you feel the real problem is an unwavering personal unpopularity, a response based in something other than how Megson's team has fared on the pitch. And there is a meanness in the way he has been treated, not to mention a sense of lingering overinflated ambitions. When Sam Allardyce left the club Bolton might easily have gone the way of Charlton after Alan Curbishley. The end of an era of budget-defying success is always a tricky time. Megson retained a reduced level of Premier League buoyancy, but that wasn't enough. Many Bolton fans expected a fresh push from the Allardyce bridgehead, and perhaps even a little fun. They got something other than fun; they got an unsmiling, unapologetic man who refuses to try to make football fans – or, it has to be said, football journalists – try to like him.
And in the end it's funny how you can start to feel a certain fondness towards anyone when they've already gone – particularly when they start to look, in a certain light, like perhaps the last in a truly curmudgeonly line, an anomaly in an era when buddying up to the media and pirouetting for the fan base is now entrenched as a vital part of the job.
