With the recent news that (former) Bolton Wanderers manager Gary Megson has just been sacked, I ask the question: ‘Was it right?’

It’s true that the Bolton fans clearly hated Megson from the start, but was their hate justified? The kind of football that he was trying to get Bolton to play was admirable, but he rarely achieved this and you always felt that he never really had the potential to achieve his goal. By this I mean that he was an idealist, and that when push came to shove he didn’t know how to make his team play any better than they already were.

The fans constantly attacked the way the team played and used any excuse that they could find to try have a go at Megson. The confusing thing here is that the club’s former manager was Sam Allardyce – a manager known for playing the worst football ever witnessed by humans. They key difference here, however, may be that ‘Big Sam’ got a lot better results than Gary Megson ever did, as he took Bolton from a relegation-scrapping club to one that constantly challenged for a place in Europe.

The one major positive to come out of this is that it shows that even in this day and age of rich billionaire chairmen and money ruling the game fans still do have a fair amount of power, and this sacking is a gentle reminder of that. However, too often we look at figures in football almost as cartoon characters, yet we must remember that a good man has just lost his job, which is never a happy time for anyone.