Eddie Davies - Obituary

I've had a long hard look at myself rammy and i'm still of the same opinion   

If he let Gartside just run the show without any kind of involvement and not keeping an eye on the figures then he is at fault for how things ended.

And for the record i was watching Bolton long before he came along and will be for many more years to come. The prem years were great granted but i would still be watching them now if we were still in league 2 for all those years and he'd never bought the club.

Norpig wrote:I've had a long hard look at myself rammy and i'm still of the same opinion   

If he let Gartside just run the show without any kind of involvement and not keeping an eye on the figures then he is at fault for how things ended.

And for the record i was watching Bolton long before he came along and will be for many more years to come. The prem years were great granted but i would still be watching them now if we were still in league 2 for all those years and he'd never bought the club.

Like many benevolent donors he decided to adopt a hands off approach and let the professional managers  (both administrators and football) run the business as they are the supposedly experts. Its a common approach in many businesses. ED didn't see this as a business- to him the involvement was much more emotional backed up by his money. He did take an interest in the numbers but let the so-called professionals make the decisions. He simply stopped being a cash cow when either he felt he had done enough, was getting low on funds himself, or just got fed up with seeing us spiral downwards. It was his choice and I hope you don't try and kid me that you know the answer as to what caused him to close his wallet.
But he still gave us the best ride we've had in the last 50 years. Like you Mr. Pig I've been watching them  since before he came on the scene and will continue to do so.
You simply can't blame him for the mess that we are in now. Blame Gartside Anderson, Lee ,Megson, Coyle Freedman, Lennon, Parkinson or the EFL- any or all of the above. But ED is simply not to blame because he said enough was enough.

I agree Gartside has to take the lion share of the blame but our problems started when Davies decided to stop funding the club.
If i had that much money invested in a club or business then i would definitely want to know what was going on, burying your hand in the sand is not really an acceptable excuse in my eyes.

Norpig wrote:I agree Gartside has to take the lion share of the blame but our problems started when Davies decided to stop funding the club.
If i had that much money invested in a club or business then i would definitely want to know what was going on, burying your hand in the sand is not really an acceptable excuse in my eyes.

How do you know he buried his head in the sand?. You're accusing him of blatant stupidity. He let Allardyce persuade Garside to buy world class ( but fading) professional players, built a fantastic stadium and keep the show on the road, punching well above our weight. That's precisely why he funded the club. The fact that he allowed managers to manage is good business behaviour. Neither you nor I nor the vast majority of people know how involved he was in keeping a watchful overview of what was happening. Its only when he saw we were a lost cause did he stop the cash flow. I don't blame him-  why throw good money after his previous £170 million or so hadn't bought permanent success, why should he continue to allow HIS money to keep funding the club.
No matter how much you argue- he was mainly responsible for our Premier league success ( and it was success for many years) and out forays into Europe. I have little memory of the players we've had over the last 6 or 8 years- but I've got great memories of the players he bought for us when we were Prem contenders..

Good post Rammy.

Surely it would have be good business practice to make sure the club was able to generate it's own funds and be more self sufficient to avoid what happened at the end though? It should never have got to the stage it did. He should have either kept closer control or sold up much earlier.

As i said before i am glad he was around to fund our good times but the club could have gone out of business because of the state the club was in when he withdrew funding and it should have been handled a million times better than it was.

There is an "in memoriam" article in today's Times on p80.
Nice touch although I do think that the Times has always been a bit condescending towards BWFC.

BoltonTillIDie wrote:Nice little tribute here:

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I quite like 'Similar topics'. You can see where folk were/are coming from but BTID was right about this 'little tribute'.

I wondered what had happened to Mark Clemmit? Is he another one of the several 'good uns' that the Beeb seem to have parted company with in recent years, I pondered before coming across this quote:

In an interview in 2009, Clemmit said: "I love the game at the lower levels. There's more access, more closeness to it, you don't have to go through 100 other people before you can speak to the person you want. You can go to a lower league ground, knock on the manager's door and if he's not busy he'll see you. You see all the Premiership players arriving in what are virtual stagecoaches, dripping in diamonds, trailing their escorts. There's an aloofness about the game at that level that I'm not really comfortable with." [

You said it, Clem.