When Manchester United took Arsenal apart at the Emirates last month in the first game to be broadcast in 3D, it was obvious which of the teams looked better on the pitch. But what about the managers?

There's no escaping it. As soon as the countdown clock appears on Sky Sports News, we all know its business time. The seconds are literally ticking away in front of our eyes, a constant reminder that the transfer window of opportunity will soon slam shut. There is only one thing that can get a person through such a stressful period. Transfer rumours. Studies don’t need to be carried out to show that time spent during the window is vastly dominated by ingesting any information available that in some way indicates who your team will at least try and purchase before midnight on deadline day. There is of course such a thing as a genuine rumour, Sky Sports News and a few others have their 'sources' that are generally on the money, but mostly transfer rumours are works of fiction that will never, ever, ever make the transformation into fact.

For fans of Bolton Wanderers, the prospect of enjoying their football may still be some time off in the future. The ethos of Sam Allardyce and his vision of how football should be played, has become so deeply ingrained into the club that, when his successor, Sammy Lee, tried to introduce a new, more cultured, passing-game to the team, he failed utterly. Like a failed organ transplant, the body rejected it. It may be that Lee is just not cut out to be a manager, and it's impossible to say exactly why he failed at Bolton, but it looked to a lot of people that the team had a good share of the blame to take as well. They seemed to have rejected Lee’s new style like spoilt kids who wouldn’t eat the pasta they’d been made and whined that they wanted the tinned spaghetti hoops they'd always had before. They got what they wished for when the board, after a string of poor results and desperate to avoid relegation, let Lee go and hired an Allardyce-Lite style manager, Gary Megson. The journeyman coach found that the agricultural football he had produced at Nottingham Forest (whose relegation to League 1 he had overseen) was exactly what the Bolton team was used to, and, eventually, they clawed their way clear of relegation.

Bolton Wanderers will begin their ninth successive Premier League season in August. And for those of us lucky enough to have been watching the Lancashire club grace the highest level of the game it’s really felt like nine years hasn’t it? To be fair, the-club-that-Big-Sam-built has achieved some pretty incredible things in that time. Against all odds, they've established themselves as a top-flight side and challenged for a Champions League place on a relatively puny budget. Not to mention winning friends across the game by resurrecting El Hadji Diouf’s career and playing a less than thrilling brand of football. It would be churlish, however, not to acknowledge that we have been treated to some flashes of great football by Wanderers down the years. Big Sam’s ‘solid’ teams were always sprinkled with quality in the shape of players like Youri Djorkaeff, Ivan Campo and the semi-legendary Jay-Jay Okocha, who could produce glimpses of football heaven.

The fact is though, that these moments from top-class players can, and did, mask the very ordinary football being played by the team as a whole.