Getting on our Bristols in the ’80s
Football is full of quirks and oddities. For instance, there are many examples of how one team can hold a longstanding jinx over another team almost irrespective of league position and status.
In the modern-day Bolton struggle to get results against both Burton Albion and Wycombe Wanderers. It’s early days to be labelling them as jinx teams but if we don’t beat them both this season then we’re getting in to that territory.
Back in the 80s there were three notable jinxes. There was the famous London jinx (no win in the capital from 1978 to 1986) and there was our inability to beat Bury on the first eight or nine occasions that we played them from 1985 after a long gap when we’d never played them dating back to the late 1960s. Then there was Bristol City.
It got to the stage where fixtures against the men from Ashton Gate were almost written off as a defeat as soon as the fixtures were published.
It all started on that glorious sunny August day in 1978 when Bolton played top flight football for the first time in 14 years. Bristol City at home was our first match after promotion and more than 20,000 came to Burnden to see Alan Gowling score an absolute screamer in front of the Match of the Day cameras. However, Bristol City were a great side and came back to win 2-1 and the harsh realities of Division One football were rammed home. They then hammered us 4-1 at Ashton Gate that November.
“There was also a 4-1 and a 3-1 hammerings away from home during the period”
Those two games were the first of 13 league games without a win against City. Add to that an F.A. Cup 3rd round defeat in 1979 at Ashton Park and then the 3-0 defeat at Wembley in the 1986 Freight Rover Trophy final and you begin to get the picture.
That fabulous first appearance at Wembley since 1958 couldn’t have come against a worse opponent. Only weeks before they’d smashed us 4-0 at Burnden. The season before (84/85) they strolled to a 4-1 win on our own turf. There was also a 4-1 and a 3-1 hammerings away from home during the period along with a number of other more close defeats.
Coming out onto the famed Wembley pitch
The scoreboard says it all, another defeat to BCFC
The occasional home draws against the Bristol City felt like wins. There was a 1-1 draw in 1979 driven by a second half surge in noise and support from the terraces and a 0-0 draw in the dying days of Bolton’s relegation season to Division Four.
The spell was finally broken in 1989 when Julian Darby scored two late goals in a third tier 2-0 home win against them. Experienced Bolton fans were delighted with the three points but even more happy with the slaying of a jinx. The following season a Scott Green 20-yarder secured a second-successive Burnden Park win in a famous victory. In 1994 we actually won at Ashton Gate – a Mark Patterson first minute goal being the only one of the match. Even in the 1990s though there were some grim results against the boys from the West Country. None quite as grim as the first time we played them in 1903 – a 5-0 win for them. Well I say none, anyone who journeyed to Ashton Gate in March 2016 to witness our 6-0 capitulation will probably argue that point.
The moral of the story? Jinxes end. We had a massive run of success against Port Vale (our overall record of success against them is absolutely incredible) – and then out of the blue they won 6-3 at Bolton in the COVID/fourth tier season.
We have Wycombe as our first home match of the season – let’s hope we score our first ever goal and notch our first ever win against the Chairboys.
Thanks to Chris Mann and the excellent Burnden Aces stats site – with whom a lot of our research wouldn’t be complete!
