SAM Allardyce and his high-flying Wanderers are beginning to command the respect of their Premiership rivals.

Just days after kicking off as 2-1 ON favourites for relegation, they top the table with maximum points.

They left their first two victims - Leicester City and Middlesbrough - in crisis and then stopped Gerard Houllier's all-conquering Liverpool in their tracks.

The Anfield Reds, unbeaten since April 13 and having won 14 of their last 15 competitive games, left the Reebok in a state of shock after goalkeeper Sander Westerweld's calamitous mistake allowed Dean Holdsworth's speculative 89th minute shot skid under his body to snatch a 2-1 victory that saw Wanderers add another record to their growing list of accolades.

No newly promoted team has managed to win its first three games since the Premiership was formed in 1992.

And there should be another first on its way with Allardyce in line to pick up the Manager of the Month award for August on the back of his team's 100 per cent record. No Bolton manager has ever won one of the Premiership's monthly prizes.

Jubilant as he celebrated one of the most momentous wins of his managerial career in front of a record Reebok crowd of 27,025, the Wanderers' boss admitted: "It's a nice feeling to see 20-odd thousand fans going absolutely wild with excitement. It was superb. The atmosphere they created gets the hairs on your neck standing on end.

"You have to pinch yourself that it's for real."

But while they are revelling in the glory of their unbelievable start to the season, Wanderers know that their incredible achievement will attract attention as well as the respect.

"Results will give you that respect," Allardyce acknowledged. "But people are probably going to start to pay that much more attention to you and that's when life will become that little more difficult again.

"People might start working out what we do and how we do it and go about the job of trying to destroy that. At the moment they might be thinking they don't have to pay that much attention to us because superiority-wise most of the sides - if not all the sides - in the Premiership have more than we have."

Houllier has steered Liverpool to an unprecedented five major trophies in six months - the latest coming last Friday when they beat European Champions Bayern Munich for the UEFA Super Cup - and is strongly tipped to be the major threat to Sir Alex Ferguson ending his Manchester United reign with his eighth Premiership title. But he found it hard to come to terms with what happened to his team at the Reebok.

"It was an unfair result," he suggested. "We didn't deserve to lose but at this level, when you make a mistake, you get punished."