Sven eyes silver as City enjoy home comfort

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As a former England coach — a relatively successful one, as it turns out — Eriksson has spent much of his first season as a Barclays Premier League manager straight-batting questions about Steve McClaren and, now, Fabio Capello.

Pretty soon, however, the questions are going to have to be about City.

With his team's remarkable 100 per cent record at home continuing with a gritty comeback against Bolton on Saturday, Eriksson knows that another win at Eastlands against Tottenham tomorrow will take the club to within touching distance of their first major final for 25 years.

The Carling Cup quarter-final may lack the lustre of other competitions but to City it would mean the world.

The players who proved too much for Bolton had better get ready to pull their boots on again. Eriksson said: "We'll play our strongest team. We'll have to see how our players are because we only have two days to prepare. It's probably the easiest way of getting into Europe so it's important to us.

"It was good for us to win after losing at Spurs last weekend. It was also good to show we can play without Elano. He is important to us, we all know that, but he couldn't have played today.

"It's important that we won this game in terms of our confidence for Tuesday.

"If we had lost this one, if the game had finished at halftime, it would not have been good for the morale or confidence."

A goal up in next to no time, courtesy of Italian centreforward Rolando Bianchi, City were nevertheless mediocre in the first half as El Hadji Diouf and Kevin Nolan scored to give Bolton a thoroughly deserved lead at the interval.

A few harsh words from Eriksson at half-time restored belief and Bolton were seen off as efforts from Didi Hamann, Darius Vassell and substitute Kelvin Etuhu shoved City back into the top four.

"I told them at half-time that they looked to me like losers," said Eriksson, not exactly renowned for sprinkling half-time magic.

"I said they had to change their attitude or indeed they would lose. In the second half we were much better."

That two of his team's goals came from centre forwards who have struggled to keep pace with the City revolution — Bianchi and Vassell — provided a talking point.

Nevertheless, both are likely to find themselves with little football to play once Valeri Bojinov regains his fitness in the New Year and Eriksson recruits another centre forward in the January sales.

Bolton look to have come a fair way since the shambles of Sammy Lee's short reign at the start of the season and were more like the team who over-achieved for so long under Sam Allardyce.

Defensive mistakes cost them on this occasion, however, and manager Gary Megson did not pull any punches, saying: "We can't say we were hard done by as we've done this to ourselves. City didn't do it, the crowd didn't do it. We did it.

"Do I go and find someone else in January who can come in from outside and help us? Or do the players here step up to the plate and show what they can do?

"What is certain is that we can't throw things away like this. You can see there has been improvement but we've lost four goals here and four at Liverpool recently. We cannot do that and just rely on what we do at home."