When West Ham entertained Bolton on October 5th 2008 the visitors claimed an improbable 3-1 victory with goals by Kevin Davies and Gary Cahill to give the visitors a 2-0 lead at half-time. Carlton Cole pulled one back with slightly more than twenty minutes remaining before a Matthew Taylor thunderbolt snuffed out the Hammers’ hopes in the last five minutes. Judging by the post-match press conferences of the managers it appears that they must have been watching different games.

“This was always going to be a hugely significant game for us, but we didn’t want to make such a big fuss of it before,” said Bolton manager Gary Megson. “You know West Ham at home will give you problems; we knew West Ham would have a lot of possession, but most of the possession they had was either square or backwards. In terms of scoring goals and causing us problems it happened sporadically, but not a huge amount, although there were problems in the first half. They had more possession than us, but we’ve obviously scored the two goals and had better opportunities to score.”

He went on to praise Kevin Davies. “Everyone’s focusing on him being a big strong lad; he’s also talented,” he said. “He works his socks off. We play him wide right; he just gets on with it. He’s a great lad; we’re happy to have him with us. I’m really pleased that he’s getting the goals that he’s got.” Megson offered a frank assessment of two of the talking points – the glaring miss by Johan Elmander and the howler by Robert Green that gifted Davies his goal. “Elmander should score when he was through,” he said. “That’s what he brought him in for. The goal that was given away, they’ll be disappointed with and their manager will be disappointed. The keeper will deal with it ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”

Megson thought that West Ham posed little threat and that his team created the better chances. “If you just set out to keep a clean sheet it’s different,” he said. “I think he [Jääskeläinen] had just one or two long range shots to save but we scored the three goals. I felt we had better chances; it’s a great result for us.”

However, Gianfranco Zola’s opinion was very different. “I’m very disappointed, because when you find your team playing well as we were before the goal you expect to score at any moment and then instead the goal comes from the opposition, but this is football,” he said. “It won’t be like this all the time. From what I saw in the first half we didn’t deserve to be losing. I think that we were controlling the game. It’s not easy when you get caught and five minutes later you give another one away, but they were the only the only chances they had. We created chances; we could have scored, but it didn’t happen. It’s a pity that they cannot play next week, but I’m sure we’re going to come back from it.”

Perceptions can differ, but the way they saw the match couldn’t have been much further apart. Were they watching the same game?