The classic “better late than never” transfer we all wanted.
Thank goodness we don’t have to endure another 6months of “Morley bench watch” at Bolton.
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Or even worse - all the posts asking where he’d “fit in”. When the very obvious answer was always FIRST PICK.
The Bolton News understands that an upfront fee of £750,000 has been paid for the 25-year-old midfielder, with that fee rising to nearly £1m with future contingencies.
The moment when, combined with Aaron “warming up” on our pitch and his family being entertained in an executive box, most of us felt confident that he’d be back on a permanent basis. And, yes, that is the much maligned Dan Rice having a friendly chat with him.
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Signing Morley does not buy any temporary respite from me. My view remains that we should have paid up a year ago, which I documented in evergreen fashion. Even amongst the wider excitement of signing 10+ players in January 2025 I was very critical and said we didn’t sign enough proven quality and signed too many players. I also regularly stated Morley was our most important player even as far back as October 2024 when he’d only played a handful of games. Rice is still at fault for our demise. He didn’t sack Dodds quickly enough. Again, I said I would’ve sacked him in summer where many disagreed. However, Rice has managed to get Duff in which has been paramount to our turnaround. This window has been handled very well so far. With two additional signings likely to come, according to Duff’s presser yesterday, then I think we have grounds to be positive that Rice is at least learning on the job.
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we have no idea why we didn’t sign him earlier but Bolton don’t appear to have been particularly helpful so you can’t blame everything on rice .
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I can and I will. Anyone who interviewed Dodds in the first place and thought that he should manage a promotion chasing League 1 side with no prior managerial experience is an idiot. Anyone that let Bloomfield walk away in those circumstances without fighting to keep him is an idiot.
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I was talking about the Morley signing nothing else
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