'Dogs of war' tactics have no place in Allardyce's style book

Few of those who left the Reebok Stadium on 19 April thought it would come to this. West Ham had been decisively beaten, the gap between Bolton and the Premiership's third-bottom club was six points and with four games remaining this was a chasm.

Should Trevor Brooking steer his beloved club to another victory this afternoon against Chelsea, Bolton will begin their evening fixture at Southampton once more in the bottom three with 40 points; the figure which is supposed to ensure safety.

Bolton know to their cost that it does not. In 1998, despite winning five of their final eight matches and reaching the 40-point barrier, they were relegated on goal difference instead of Everton. The irony, lost on few at the Reebok, was that when the two sides had met at the ground's official opening, Bolton had a goal which had blatantly crossed the line disallowed. Had it stood, Everton would have succumbed.

Five years on, the club still appears dogged by the combination of ill-fortune and poor refereeing, which has driven its manager, Sam Allardyce, to the brink of either decisive action or paranoia, depending on your point of view. He has compiled a dossier which he claims "proves" Bolton have been the victims of biased refereeing and copies will be sent to the Referees' Association and the League Managers' Association.

Right now, only the result at St Mary's concerns him. "We have to make sure we draw the game, because if we do, West Ham are away to Birmingham on the final day and we are at home to Middlesbrough and the odds are in our favour," said Allardyce. "As long as it's in our hands then I'm fine with that. Fantastically as they have done, West Ham are still the catch-up merchants. After we beat them at the Reebok, I would not have envisaged they would have come up with two 1-0 wins."

If Bolton survive – and it would be a cruel observer who said that they deserve to go down – Allardyce would place the turning point as a game against West Ham; not the recent victory at the Reebok but a 1-1 draw at Upton Park in December. "It meant we weren't bottom of the table on Christmas Day, a position from which no club has survived.

"They haven't done the normal thing to get out of this position. They haven't become dogs of war, battlers," said Allardyce. "We have played our way out. Mr Wenger suggested that we kicked our way out, but last Saturday Arsenal committed 18 fouls to our 15. I find that a strange scenario even to suggest. Perhaps because Arsenal have cracked under the pressure, they have to look for an excuse." West Ham, he argued, have resorted to rough-house tactics far more than Bolton.

"Dogs of war" is an interesting phrase for Allardyce to use. It does not mean "battlers" but "mercenaries" and that is precisely what Bolton's team is composed of – 11 foreigners nearly all on short-term contracts. Back in December you would have imagined a team such as this would be unlikely to fight for the cause. Instead, perhaps because they are not emotionally involved with Bolton in the same way Joe Cole and Jermain Defoe are with West Ham, they have performed without fear. Should Bolton survive, Youri Djorkaeff and Jay-Jay Okocha will remain at the Reebok and Allardyce "hopes" Bernard Mendy and Florent Laville will join them.

He argued Bolton began badly because the transfer window meant he had to bring in a raft of foreign players in the summer rather than introducing them gradually over the course of a season. "Those players will admit they were not ready to play in the Premiership. Once they tasted it they found out that, no matter how much we had tried to warn them, they couldn't realise in their wildest imagination it was going to be as tough as it was. It might not be the most technically proficient league but the Premiership is the hardest place to play; physically and mentally. If you can get them to adjust to that with the skills they've got, then you've a fantastic chance."

Laville, a central defender brought in from Lyon in January, adjusted with enormous speed and Allardyce credits the clean sheets he has produced for Bolton's end-of-season surge. "We have turned them round astonishingly quickly. You think of Dennis Bergkamp, who cost £7m and took 18 months to find his feet. You look at Thierry Henry sitting in his flat in London in his first season here saying he can't do it for Arsenal."

None of them were straightforward signings. "All our players have had problems with their clubs, that's why they're at Bolton. But you meet them as human beings and say can you deal with them. The hardest part for a manager is to get the top players right because it's the most volatile and expensive end. Every lecturer I've ever listened to has told me that if you're not a man manager you'll never be successful."

If Bolton do begin a third successive season of top-flight football for the first time since 1963, Allardyce knows they will have a chance to really establish themselves in the Premiership in the way Charlton have done. "We will not automatically be deemed relegation fodder, which will relieve pressure on the club and the players. Are the teams coming up better equipped financially to survive than those who came up last year? Will they have as much spending power as Manchester City and Birmingham? Not likely.

"Whether we can move Bolton on depends on how quickly can we reduce the debt and reinvest back into the football club because if you don't reinvest in the football side, ultimately you fail. At the moment we are only living on the short term with loan players; they are not investments, they are short-term stop-gaps. We are renting a house instead of buying one." Now, he says, is the time for Bolton to get on the Premiership's property ladder.