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Bolton Wanderers v. Sunderland

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And lo, Owen Coyle and his Mighty Wanderers returned to t'Reebok carrying the great meat pie of Wigan after defeating Hugo of Rodallega and the one they call (Victor) Moses after some brilliant work by David Ngog, Chris Eagles and the double agent known as Steve Gohouri. That's right, the boys are back in town (even though they never really left because you could walk to Wigan) to face Sunderland in the battle of the under pressure Premier League managers.

Bolton return on a high note after claiming all three points at the DW to climb off the bottom of the table. If Bolton were to get all three points at home against Sunderland and if results happened to go their way this weekend, the Wanderers could realistically climb as high as 12th in the table. There are only four teams to score more goals this season than the Whites with Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea, and Tottenham taking the top of that table while no team (shocking, I know) has let in more than Bolton. 

In eight Premier League matches this season, nine different wanderers have scored and if you'd like to include two Carling Cup matches to make it all competitions, that's 11 different trotters on the scoresheet. Sunderland, who sit one place above Bolton on goal differential have had seven different scorers with the leader, Sebastian Larsson, sitting on three. 

Like us, Sunderland also lost to Norwich by a score of 2-1 and like us, the strikers aren't scoring as much as they should be. Anyone could have told old Steve Bruce that signing Nicklas Bendtner wouldn't help much in that department but he wouldn't have listened.  With that being the case, it's reported that Brucey is thinking of handing 18 year old Connor Wickham the start up front. 

We don't expect Owen Coyle to make many, if any, changes to the side that demolished Wigan. I fully expect good games from both David Ngog and Kevin Davies as Ngog should be buoyed by his performance against the Latics and for SKD to want to put one into the back of the net after his soft Wigan penalty take.