Wanderers fan Elizabeth Evans, who lives in France, keeps track of her heroes through the BEN web site.

And she has sent us this report from Europe's leading soccer magazine France Football, which offers a different perspective on Wanderers' dream start to the season.

She writes: I live in France and am limited to following Bolton from abroad now, although we try and squeeze our holiday around bumper times for matches and get as many as we can in.

However, I thought you would be interested in this article that appeared in the French football magazine France Football on September 25. I have translated it from the original. It really was heart-warming to read such a nice review of us in a French national magazine and see how we've captivated football fans everywhere. Let's hope we manage to keep it up.

La Sensation Bolton

Greater Manchester, two-and-a-half million inhabitants and, frankly speaking, not the sort of place you find a lot of tourists.

Bolton, north west of Manchester, is one of its 10 districts, a town where dreams are restricted to football, as is often the case in this corner of England. It became a prosperous town at the turn of the 19th century with the textile industry, and with the decline of this in the 20th century, Bolton suffered. Today, whilst not being a ghost town, Bolton sometimes has a ghostly look - except of course on Saturday afternoons.

On this day, workers in the chemical factories, abattoirs and paperworks, which replaced the weaving factories, head towards the futuristic Reebok Stadium - built in the middle of a huge commercial centre like a flying saucer from "Close Encounters of a Third Kind", 10 km from the town centre.

The paradox of the closeness of this stadium - which cost 450 million French francs - to a town that has been deserted by the middle class is not exclusive to Bolton. Impoverished Sunderland has the Stadium of Light, one of the most beautiful stadiums in the country.

But in the enclosure where Sam Allardyce's players move, it appears even more incongruous than the Mackems of Sunderland. At first, you'd think you're at Stamford Bridge. A luxurious hotel with 125 rooms has been built within the stadium; and, like at Chelsea, the Reebok (one of the first sporting arenas in Europe to be named after its sponsor) doesn't belong to the club itself, but to an anonymous firm on the Stock Exchange whose ambitions are not restricted to football (banquets, seminars, rock concerts, when the Wanderers are playing away). It is in this unreal setting that the Tom Thumb of the Premier League has decided to write the fairytale of the start of the season.

No other promoted team has ever won their first three matches among the elite. Bolton has. No other promoted team has ever allowed themselves after six days to be ahead of Manchester United and Arsenal, who were held 1-1 at Highbury. Bolton has. No other coach of a promoted team has ever received the "Manager of the Month" at the start of his stint in the Premier League. Sam Allardyce has.

And those who predicted that the Trotters would go straight back down are now talking of a "new Wimbledon", an easy parallel to make given that one of the main architects of Bolton's current success was, until 1997, a member of the dreaded London's "Crazy Gang": the striker Dean Holdsworth.

"Being where we are today is not a question of luck," he explains.

"We tear each others guts out to get the ball or to fill a space in the defence. That's teamwork."

A team spirit maintained in all possible and imaginable ways by the coach. For example: a system of forfeits has been set up. If the team wins by more than three clear goals, the players can set a forfeit for 8 members of the Board, amongst whom is Phil Gartside, the Chair.

So it was that, after a brilliant victory against Leicester in August (5-0 away, if you please!), Mr Gartside had to sit down to a meal which included sheep's testicles and phall, a curry so hot that it brought tears to Vinnie Jones' eyes!

Holdsworth, who was thinking of retiring to become ... a writer ... has rediscovered the desire to play at 32 years: "It's hard to imagine anything better than being with 30 or 40 guys who have such a laugh together. Here, we know how to enjoy ourselves, on the pitch as well as in the changing room and that has played a big part in our success."

As has the personality of the coach: "In Sam we have a manager who doesn't play dirty tricks on us. If he calls you names, everyone has forgotten about it five minutes later!"

Allardyce also knows how to remember things. This native of the Midlands - the home of Leicester City and Aston Villa - started playing at Bolton as a central defender and wore their colours from 1973-80 and then from 1984-86. He may be a wanderer in his soul, but in coming back to Lancashire, he is also back where he started at "his" club. And with what success! Bolton, one of the 12 founding clubs of the Football League, four times winner of the FA Cup - including the one in 1923 which was the first ever to be played at Wembley - , also the club of the great Nat Lofthouse, was a shadow of its former self.

After propping up the old First Division for nearly a century, Bolton lost its footing at the start of the 1980s, ending up in the Fourth Division in 1988. The following decade saw a spectacular ascent, with Bolton continually on the move: promotion in 1995, relegation in 1996, promotion again in 1997 and back down in 1998. And then an attempt - without success - in 1999 (the year Allardyce took over the reins) and in 2000. Before another promotion in 2001. Will this infernal cycle stop some day? Allardyce is convinced it will: "We are making progress with each match. And this season our objective is not just to stay up. We want to have a good go in the League Cup. Given the atmosphere within the club at the moment, anything is possible."

And if he's laid his hat in Lancashire, it is for a long time: there is talk of a 10 year contract ... because Allardyce is also at Bolton to create an Academy which, he adds without the slightest trace of irony, "will allow us one day to rival Manchester United." MU being their loathed neighbour, whom the Trotters supporters will only refer to as "manure".

If the moustachioed Bolton coach lends himself sometimes to caricature - where he personifies the defender of bygone values - it is because the people mocking him suffer from myopia. The gruff joker who swears like a trooper is also a convinced user of ProZone, a software which allows him to dissect the performances of each of his players after the match. He has also recruited a psychologist and subjects his team to daily "visualisation" and "motivation" sessions. His purchases testify to an open-mindedness which jars with his image as a footballer from another time.

The Scandinavians are here in strength: the Finnish Jaaskelainen, the Danish Bo Hansen and Per Frandsen (ex-LOSC), the Icelandic Gudni Bergson, who is probably the only professional footballer in the world to have also been a lawyer (at the bar in Reykjavik). But his team also includes a Jamaican, Ricardo Gardner, one of the Reggae Boyz of 1998, three French players - Djibril Diawara, Michal Kaprielian and Bruno Ngotty, arrived this week, and an Italian Emanuele Morini, and a Japanese player, Akinori Nishizawa, who has gone ahead of the Gunner's Junichi Inamoto in the race to become the first Japanese player of the Premier League.

The stereotypers will be back again. But the prophets of doom? Dean Holdsworth has seen enough not to temper the enthusiasm of the club's supporters: "It happens to a lot of teams to go two or three months without being able to win even one match in the Premier League. That's when we'll find out who our true friends are. That's when we'll see what we're made of, when we'll have to stick to our beliefs and hope we come out stronger."