Can Anyone Put a Hand on Bolton Now?
Bolton Wanderers made it ten games without defeat with a 2-0 win at Sunderland, while Portsmouth kept the gap at six points.
You could hear the away end before you saw them — a wall of noise rolling down from the top tier as Bolton's second went in at Sunderland, and the home faithful sitting in silence around it. Two-nil, ten games gone, eight won and two drawn, twenty-six points. Six clear of Portsmouth, who ground out their own result at Southend, and the only unbeaten side left in the division. "We're not looking at the table," one of them told us afterwards, grinning, and nobody in that away end believed a word of it.
Norwich stay fifth on seventeen despite drawing with Ipswich and then losing at home to Derby, so it is Oxford, up from tenth to third, and Preston, fourth, who are doing the chasing. At the other end Sunderland sit second-bottom on seven, with Cheltenham beneath them on six. Bolton have the look of a side that expects to win. The question is whether anybody can make them stop.