Yeah, unfortunately whilst it's easy to say "Tony must be ruthless and get rid of <player>", it's all dependent on whether anybody else is going to be interested - also keeping in mind we're probably paying the likes of Williams, Smallwood, Evans and Mulgrew well in excess of what other clubs would be willing to offer. The big mistake was handing out contracts so generously this summer. Should have waited to see how these players (all of whom either helped relegate us or in Smallwood's case helped relegate another team) performed in the current campaign. I don't think many would have been calling for any of the four players mentioned there to be renewed now.

Whilst ideally Williams would be sold in the summer, I don't foresee there being a huge amount of interest in taking him off our hands. He's here until 2021, most likely, but at best he should be in the Downing position of 4th choice/emergency CB when all our other options are injured or suspended. He shouldn't be anywhere near the LB position.

We have to hope that tonight is a turning point for Mowbray, and he has finally seen what so many of us have been saying for months - we don't need to play defensively in every match, and it's okay to let the opposition worry about us rather than it always being the other way around. The talent is there in the squad, the manager just needs to trust in these players to go out there and take the game to teams. I'm absolutely sure the performance of the team tonight reflects their relief that the shackles were finally taken off, and it gave them a determination to show that if trusted to do so they can go out and dominate the opposition. It's time the manager started having faith in our players rather than fretting over how our opponents can hurt us. Caution is commendable but not to the detriment of the players' belief, and tonight we saw that these players do still believe in themselves to deliver. They just need the manager to believe in them too.

Needs to start every match from now until the end of the season. Similarly Smallwood and Evans need to disappear. I don't care if Reed isn't going to be here next season, we're still better off playing him alongside Travis.

A good win tonight but it doesn't excuse the last 2 months I'm afraid. If Mowbray can continue on this trajectory until the season's end then I might gain a little more faith back in him, but if he reverts to type then tonight will just be a blip. Desperately hoping TM has finally seen the light and realises it's time to take off the shackles and make teams worry about us.

I was at a gig tonight, wtf happened here? Looks like Mowbray finally found his balls and Rothwell showed why he deserves a proper run in the team. 23 shots to 6! Have we ever been that dominant under TM? I'm struggling to think of any game where we had that many more shots compared to the opposition. I'm stunned. Keep performing like that until the end of the season and maybe there's hope for Mowbray after all. Revert back to Evans/Smallwood and he can get lost. One of our biggest mistakes this season was giving the pair of them new contracts.

It probably is a bit harsh to say we went up despite Mowbray, however I don't think the job was that difficult either. We had a squad that pretty much every other manager in that division would have given their right arm for. We retained all of our best players whilst also bringing in a player in Dack who was considered one of if not the best player in the division. I think most competent managers would have gotten us up from that position and likely won the league as well. There are plenty of less competent managers who would have made a mess of it, but if Paul Hurst could get Shrewsbury to 3rd then there was no excuse not to finish second at the very least. We're in a position now where we need to say thank you for getting us back into the Championship, Tony, but to stay here we need much better than this. Unfortunately I see this as very unlikely, and in a few months we could easily be staring at the abyss once again and relying on our clueless owners to spin the wheel and get lucky again.

Tbf I always had a feeling he was hugely overrated by some on here. Surely he would have ended up somewhere better than Bolton at his age if he was that good?

He and the players genuinely seem to think that they are working at optimum level, which suggests there is an incredibly low bar at the club.

Functional is the best way you could describe us under Mowbray last season. We got the job done despite never looking especially dominant or even particularly good, with a few exceptions (Rotherham at home comes to mind). That carried on at the start of this season, but getting smashed by Wigan and Preston seemed to wreck the belief in the camp and with little else to fall back on it's been mostly downhill ever since. It should have come back after our January run, but somehow it's actually gotten even worse.

Very worrying when you read stuff like this. Venky's really have stripped the pride from this club and left us with fans who are happy to tread just above the Championship relegation zone.

As I said, Dack and Attwood have the mental age of teenagers, so it's up to Mowbray to try and manage that.

The EFL and integrity? Hah. It's just a self-preservation society that answers to nobody but itself.

They're absolutely desperate for Bolton to limp to the season's end so they don't have to deal with issues arising from postponed/forfeited matches.

I've commented on this before - Mulgrew's body language after goals are conceded is absolutely pathetic. Same for the rest of the team, but he's supposed to be our captain. Instead he walks off, hands on hips, looking like a teenager who's just been told the WiFi isn't working. Not captain material and needs to be gone in the summer if possible. He's run his course here. His set-pieces are obviously going to be missed but we shouldn't be relying so heavily on them anyway. Plus an analysis I did a little while back shows we rarely actually win when Mulgrew scores.

Probably what Mowbray is telling them tbh. If the players think that these levels of performance are acceptable then no wonder we aren't improving.

Judging by his shooting since then he probably miskicked it.

Like most of our team, he was doing really well up until November. Then it all seemed to go to shit - for everybody, Dack included. By the 10th November he'd scored 8 goals. Since then just 4. Something hasn't been right for a while with him, but nonetheless I can't advocate selling him. Not when we have so little goal threat or creativity across the rest of the team. We can surely only consider selling him if we have more productive players in the team first.

I'd take that gamble purely because I have 100% lost my faith in Mowbray as manager of this club. I can understand not wanting to take the gamble if you still have some belief in him, though. For me the Evans/Smallwood axis being employed yesterday alongside Bennett in the no10 role destroyed any small amount of hope I had in Mowbray turning it around. I don't think he's capable of understanding or accepting the mistakes he's made, and I think they'll continue on into next season and if he is sacked at some point we'll be right back to where we were when Coyle left.

Our form since November suggests that if he gets it wrong - and in the last two windows he 100% has - we are very likely to either be relegated or face a huge battle to stay up next season. Is it worth risking our Championship future because the guy got us to finish 2nd in League 1? Not for me. That's too big of a gamble and it ignores everything in Mowbray's history, which suggests he can't his teams out of these types of spirals.

It's actually 6 after yesterday's loss. Their last two wins came at the end of February against QPR and, you guessed it, Rovers.

Bennett is the type of player who is fine when surrounded by players that hide his weaknesses, but struggles otherwise. Like a poundstore version of James Milner. Mulgrew was never the best defender, even in L1, but age combined with playing at a higher level really seems to have caught up with him now. It's a shame but neither should be starting for us next season. Probably time for Mulgrew to move on - I'd keep Bennett as a squad player, as in the right team I still think he can be effective and his energy if nothing else should be useful coming off the bench for the last twenty minutes if we need to scrap. It's scary how big of an overhaul we need in the summer though, both in terms of personnel and playing style. If Mowbray is staying then he had better be thinking about it already, as there is a lot of work to be done.

Easy to be a "leader" when things are going well, but the real leaders show themselves when things aren't going as planned. Do we have any?

Not sure it was post match, I can't remember where it was from. It caused a bit of a furore when it came out though. I think it might have been back in November when Wigan and Preston beat us.

I appreciate that in the modern game you need to give the players some degree of control, but Mowbray's comments made it sound like at half time he just went out for a cup of tea whilst the lads discussed amongst themselves, then came back just as they were about to go out and said "alright boys, go get 'em!" ... now it was probably just TM wording it badly, but even so those comments didn't give me confidence Mowbray has a good grip on this team. They like him, sure, but do they respect him enough to really listen when he has something to say? Based on the last five months, barring January, it seems increasingly that the answer is no.