Man of the Match: Mark Davies

We have a couple of good candidates for Man of the Match, but Not-Man of the match is easy. Paul Robinson maintains his perfect record of winning that title. Both Macclesfield goals were scored with Mr. Robinson standing in between the player with the ball and the goal. Both times he barely moved. Zatyiah Knight spent a fair amount of time essentially playing left back to cover for the Welsh anchorweight. Owen Coyle really had no other choice though. Sam Ricketts needed to be rested.

To be fair, Darren Pratley and Kevin Davies did not exactly cover themselves in glory either. On the bright side, all three of those players will not be spending a whole lot of time on the pitch over the next few months. To find out who will be spending a lot of time on the pitch, and which of those gentlemen will receive the highly-coveted Lion of Vienna Suite Man of the Match, you'll just have to hit the jump.

Ivan Klasnic scored our first goal, and had several chances to win it late. If he had taken one of them, this post would have been much easier to write. The good news is that the Klasnic-David Ngog partnership seems to be developing nicely. I wouldn't advocate playing them both against Manchester United next week though.

Macclesfield scored twice, and Adam Bogdan really couldn't do anything about either one of them. The young Hungarian played well, making some great saves early and showing much more command of the box than he did against Everton. He also showed no hangover from watching Tim Howard's clearance soar into his goal from 80 yards out a few days ago.

Nigel Reo-Coker worked hard to break up play in the center of the pitch. It's a thankless job, and he has done it well for most of the season. So, Nigel, thanks. You weren't MOTM though.

In the 63rd minute, Mark Davies came on for a largely ineffective (although not as bad as the Twitterverse seemed to think) Darren Pratley. A few moments later Macclesfield went up 2-1 on a tremendous finish by Mendy. From that moment on, Bolton looked like a different team. They began to dominate the midfield, controlled possession, and created several scoring opportunities. All of this was due to the presence of Mark Davies, his hard-charging, aggressive movement was too much for Macclesfield to handle. He won the free kick that led to the second goal, and he almost won Bolton the match.

In the darkest days of the past few months, i have imagined a midfield of Davies, Stuart Holden and Chung-Yong Lee leading Bolton back into the top half of the table, and eventually into Europe once again. That may be a ways off, but for today, Mark Davies is the Lion of Vienna Suite Man of the Match.