BURY EXPELLED FROM THE EFL
When Ken Anderson arrived at BoltonWanderers in 2016, I knew early onthat something wasn’t right. When Steve Dale arrived at Bury, I didn’t.
It’s been three years since I decided to join Bury. I’d played over 100 games for Bolton but my contract was running out and Anderson had just taken over. He had a meeting with the players, and I wasn’t convinced. There didn’t seem to be a plan, nor an idea of where the club would go next. They offered me a new deal, but I chose to leave. As things later turned out, my initial judgement about Anderson was right. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about Dale. He said all the right things when he bought Bury, and I thought he was a good person who’d take the club forward. He didn’t. I was wrong.
Bury showed me real ambition when I first signed for the club back in 2016. Stewart Day was the owner then. The club were in League One, but they wanted to be in the Championship and were making every effort to get there. They were signing players such as myself and James Vaughan, and a lot of good players were already there. They also had a great training ground for that level – we trained at Manchester City’s old training base in Carrington.
I was 33 then and it was very close to home – my little lad plays in the youth system at Liverpool. The move made perfect sense for me. It felt like I was joining a normal, ambitious club.
Day was a decent guy. He seemed like an owner who was doing the right things and signing the right sort of players. As a player, that’s all you want to see. You’re not going to say, ‘Can I see the bank books?’
We started that first season really well: we were right at the top of League One for the first month or two. Then we had loads of injuries and it
