Megson calls on stars to perform

05 November 2009 15:54
Zat Knight and Gary Cahill will make up the centre-half pairing for Bolton as they take on Villa in Saturday's Premier League game at Villa Park.[LNB]Both players were recruited by Megson from Villa, with Cahill having already gone back to play with his new club there twice over the last two seasons.[LNB]On both those occasions it proved a humiliating experience, with Villa winning the fixture 4-0 and 4-2, and Megson hopes that Cahill - and now Knight, who was also shown the door by Martin O'Neill - will feel they have a point to prove on Saturday.[LNB]"I'm sure they will feel like that - being ex-Villa players they will want to go and put a show on," Megson said.[LNB]"In the past we've had ex-Villa players like Gavin McCann, Jlloyd Samuel and Gary Cahill who to be perfectly honest, have never done themselves justice when they have gone back to Villa Park.[LNB]"It will be nice if we can go there and the two lads perform in a way that I know they can."[LNB]Samuel will be unable to make his return to Villa as part of the Bolton squad following his sending-off against Chelsea at Reebok Stadium last weekend.[LNB]The incident, in which he brought down Didier Drogba a minute before half-time to give away a penalty, led to the first goal for the Blues in a 4-0 win.[LNB]It was Chelsea's second 4-0 victory over Bolton in four days after their similar triumph in the Carling Cup, but Megson insists that his players have been left far from deflated.[LNB]Asked if he thought their confidence had been knocked, Megson said: "Not at all - in fact, I would say it has even gone up.[LNB]"With 11 against 11, Chelsea didn't score against us and we gave not far off as good as we got.[LNB]"I accept that their quality was better than ours but they knew that they had been in a game for 45 minutes.[LNB]"If Jlloyd hadn't been sent off, I'm sure it would have been different, and I didn't feel it should have been 4-0 - the fourth one was offside.[LNB]"If we had had our full complement on and we had got into the second half and started the way we did with 10 men, we might have got a better result. I think we did ourselves proud."[LNB]The heavy losses to Chelsea have brought Bolton back down to earth after a run of form that saw them suffer only one defeat in seven matches.[LNB]That sequence included a 2-2 draw with Tottenham, a 3-2 win over Everton and a 2-1 defeat at Manchester United from which they were unlucky not to emerge with a point, and Megson believes things are still on the up despite the blip over the past few days.[LNB]"The players were clapped off the pitch at half-time and at full-time (against Chelsea in the league)," Megson said.[LNB]"They got a great deal of plaudits at Manchester United, beat Everton for the first time in a long time and put in a fantastic performance against Tottenham, just getting caught at a set-piece.[LNB]"Everything is going brilliantly.[LNB]"It's just one of the issues that you get in the Premier League, and it's why everyone wants to watch it - you're not just playing against the best teams in your country or Europe, but the best teams in the world.[LNB]"It's not just me who has been positive. The media, the supporters, they know what's going on, they have seen it."[LNB]With regard to matters off the pitch, Megson admitted that the news that the club's parent company had made a loss over the last financial year was concerning.[LNB]"You don't want to see your company losing money. I don't get involved with it at all, but if the club is losing money, then it's not a nice thing to see," he said.[LNB]Asked whether he had spoken to the chairman about the implications for the club's transfer budget, Megson said: "No, because everyone is trying to achieve the same things at the football club - we want the results on the pitch and we would like the results off the pitch to go hand in hand with that.[LNB]"I know that the training ground is a lot cheaper to run than it ever has been, and I know how much there is in terms of transfers coming in and transfers going out and how much we've spent.[LNB]"I don't know the whole gamut of what goes on at Bolton and it's not my job to know.[LNB]"But I do know that on the football side of it, we have taken a side from the bottom of the table to mid-table and not spent a huge amount of money."[LNB][LNB]

Source: Team_Talk