IAN HERBERT: Bolton Wanderers should be dead and buried by now. Yet they’re heading to Wembley

A new exhibit at Bolton Museum, one of the hidden gems of a city that has had its struggles, is based on LS Lowry’s iconic painting Going to the Match, which is currently on loan.

The painting shows Bolton Wanderers supporters flocking to the old Burnden Park ground.

It is beautifully displayed, amongst artifacts reflecting the experience of being a Bolton Wanderers supporter over the years and the club’s many trips to Wembley.

‘The football club is the main artery of our city’, reflects a fan in a short film made for the exhibition, which cannot be missed, regardless of the colors of their football.

The tramps have been through purgatory for the last 10 years and exist in the shadow of such Premier League royalty that they should probably be dead and gone by now.

However, this weekend the city will send the bulk of its 35,000 fans, a tenth of its entire population, to Wembley for the Football League Trophy final.

This is how it has been all season: 25,000 for the home game against Derby, 20,000 for the arrival of Ipswich, 19,000 for Exeter City. And how it has been for many other clubs in cities like this, across the country: Ipswich, Stockport, Swindon, Barnsley and more.

Not just in the EFL, where attendances are up 12 per cent on last season and more season tickets have been sold than at any time this century. But in the National League, where more than 16,000 people watched Notts County beat Scunthorpe last weekend.

Three years ago Bolton were running out of shirts without the sponsor’s name on the front, straight from the club shop because they owed cash to every company they had ever worked with.

His own staff relied on food banks. His fall took them three places off the bottom of League Two.

So how can there still be so many followers? Why this support, in a world where there are infinitely more alternatives to watching Bolton Wanderers and not everyone gets to see Port Vale at home as the height of cool?

Because there’s some high-quality football drama unfolding in League One, with five former Premier League clubs occupying the top six.

Because there is a group of seriously progressive people, led by businesswoman Sharon Brittan, who now runs Bolton, a club whose supporters even have a say in kit designs. Because the Premier League puts a price on many.

Because of the rich quality of discourse on football now, which, as writer Janan Ganesh observed in an article for the FT at the weekend, is of a kind inconceivable a generation ago.

Social media has provided a platform. In Marc Iles of the Bolton News, the town also has a journalist who has well mapped out every inch of the club’s rocky path.

But above all, this is a story of the identity that football brings to places that need it, even if the thread of the past is thinning on the streets of Bolton’s city centre.

One means of tracing it was a wonderful image of the Wanderers players training on the Burnden Park ground before the 1953 FA Cup final. The delight on their faces speaks of a simpler, less moody and self-conscious world of football. the picture.

And behind them, on the roof of the main stand, as they hop onto a bench, is a sign advertising a restaurant in the city’s Nelson Square: the Pack Horse Inn.

I looked for the Pack Horse on Monday and needless to say, it’s gone. Now it has been converted into student flats. I looked up the Bolton Castle pub, on Tonge Moor Road, which was run by Nat Lofthouse, the player who was Bolton until its early days and is captured on the far left of that beautiful black and white photograph.

There were pictures of the Lofthouse on the walls of the pub, but nothing to explain the connection. What did you say it was called? I was asked, when I asked about Bolton’s Vienna Lion in the bar.

The square and pub don’t ooze wealth and neither does the city’s main pedestrian street, with its e-cigarette shops, cash converters and signs declaring that Marks and Spencer is moving on April 19. But pride in place is unmissable. .

It’s in the faces of the regulars at the Chetham Arms pub in Turton, opposite the serene churchyard where Lofthouse’s ashes were scattered with those of his wife Alma, high above the town.

He is in conversation with Mandy Foster, the fourth generation of a family to run the Tobutt Sports store on Blackburn Road, which celebrated 100 years in business last weekend.

“I think people are looking for their own place and their own city more than ever,” Foster tells me. ‘The world is more complicated, isn’t it? There are more options, but people want to feel like there is a place where they belong. Soccer is part of that.’ The store does not sell online but it has adapted and is thriving.

The vagabonds have also adapted. Their road to recovery, fifth place in League One and this weekend’s final against leaders Plymouth, has not been linear.

Mistakes in player recruitment led to the release of a director of football, Tobias Phoenix. Manager Ian Evatt says if the League Two struggles hadn’t taken place behind closed doors, he might as well have been away.

Perhaps something is written in the stars this weekend for Bolton, as Lowry’s masterpiece takes a stand and talk of the centenary of the 1923 ‘White Horse’ FA Cup final between Wanderers and West Ham.

Or maybe not, because the Plymouths are strong and games are not won by feeling. But win or lose, they’ll be packed against Cambridge United, week one on Friday. The signs at the entrances to the town tell this story. “Welcome to Bolton,” they state. “Home of Bolton Wanderers”.

The email drops, like the first spring call. It’s from the brilliant Stockport Trinity CC, inviting registration for this summer’s All Stars Cricket for children aged five to eight.

My grandson and I attended last summer – he was the one who signed up – and from the initial uncertainty of children and a sport he was not familiar with, the one-hour sessions – eight in all – became a delight. There will be a session near you. Click ‘play’ on the ECB website.

I will not forget the gritty and relentless detail with which Liz Ritchie and her husband Charles described to me how their son Jack, an outgoing, self-assured and life-affirming 17-year-old student, became drawn to the game. He never kicked the addiction. He was 24 years old when he took his own life.

I thought of them when William Hill was fined £19.2m for repeatedly failing to help players trying to self-exclude and protect themselves.

Another gambling company bought William Hill last summer with full knowledge that this fine was looming. They simply paid £250m less. As the charity Gambling with Lives observes, the fine was ‘a cost of doing business’.

Salvation for Southend United, who I wrote about in this space a few weeks ago. Ron Martin, a loathed owner who had dragged them down, is selling.

Testimony to the tireless work of the Shrimpers Trust and fanzines like Southend’s All At Sea.

And proof that organizations like these are British football’s most valuable asset.