Bolton preview

There's no better way to purge oneself of frustration than through an act of violence against something weak and defenceless. Anyone who's played GTA will know this to be true. We won't be able to win back the three points we dropped at Hull tonight, but we might just be able to repair some of the damage to our self-esteem. We were dreadful on Saturday, really terrible, but a good win this evening and it's water under the bridge. Looking at it objectively we ought to win well against Bolton - our home record is excellent, their away record is poor. This being City I can't be too confident, but we really should have enough.

I anticipate seeing some changes from Saturday. Roberto Mancini has almost confirmed that Adam Johnson and Patrick Vieira, his two signings who perked up the performance on Saturday will start this evening. With this being a home game I'm sure we'll switch back to 4-4-2, meaning that Johnson will come in for the injured Bellamy on the left wing while Vieira will - I imagine - partner Nigel de Jong rather than the jaded Gareth Barry. On the right wing we have a straight choice between Martin Petrov and Shaun Wright-Phillips, while in defence we are still waiting to hear on the fitness of Vincent Kompany, Joleon Lescott and Micah Richards. Presuming Richards is fit but the other two aren't, this is how I think we'll set up:


We have a decent record in this fixture - we won it last year and the year before - and we have now scored in our last twenty one consecutive league games at Eastlands. Some will point to the fact that we haven't actually put in a convincing performance since the win at Molineux, which is true enough, but fails to acknowledge that results on the whole have been acceptable and that there will necessarily be a teething period with as big a mid-season transition as we are going through. We've still got some excellent players, and not all of them are out of form, so I'm going to go against every instinct and predict a comfortable, if dull, 2-0 win tonight.