Desperate roll of the dice may now be Bolton Wanderers tactical blueprint: View | OneFootball

Bolton Wanderers have played a flat 3-5-2 for the vast majority, if not all, of the last two and a half years but a tweak may be the new normal.

Highlights

For the final 20 or so minutes of Bolton Wanderers’ 2-0 defeat against Oxford United in the League One play-off final at Wembley Stadium in mid-May, the Trotters’ manager, Ian Evatt, did something he never did last season and decided to tweak his system.

Off came Player of the Year Josh Sheehan and top scorer Dion Charles as Wanderers switched from a flat 3-5-2 to a 3-4-1-2, with Aaron Collins dropping into a deeper number ten role.

It didn’t work in the way in which Bolton would have liked, as they continued to not create anything of any meaning without any potency whatsoever, but it perhaps was a roll of the dice that has shifted Evatt’s tactical focus.

As he romped to National League title success during the curtailed 2019/20 season with Barrow, Evatt deployed the 3-4-1-2 to great effect and the general view was that would be his preference at Wanderers, but he soon shelved it when they found themselves battling relegation from League Two.

However, with the line-up released ahead of a pre-season friendly against Middlesbrough last weekend showing a 3-4-1-2 and targets that have been reported in the local news, it could well be the way in which Evatt intends to play throughout this campaign – rather than just a desperate roll of the dice.

Make-up of the Bolton squad and targeting Dembele, McAtee, Armstrong

With the season now rapidly approaching, Bolton will struggle to tweak anything in terms of their system because there is simply a lack of players suitable for it available to them.

If Wanderers wanted to switch to a back four, then the lack of genuine out-and-out wingers means that they would simply be ‘getting by’ with players playing slightly out of position.

And yet, as it stands, the exact same can be said for the back three with wing-backs that Evatt seems intent on playing. For example, Nathanael Ogbeta and Zac Ashworth were two left wing-backs who left the club after their loan deals at the end of last season and have since signed for Plymouth Argyle and Blackpool respectively, with the other left wing-back, Randell Williams, picking up an injury in pre-season.

On the right-hand side, both Josh Dacres-Cogley and Gethin Jones have played the right wing-back role, with Dacres-Cogley exclusively a wing-back for Evatt. That is despite both of those players being more suited to a back four system – and Jack Iredale on the left-hand side.

So, as it stands, the make-up of the squad as they head into their two pre-season friendlies that are at home this summer against Fiorentina and Stoke City, makes it difficult to genuinely play any system with balance.

The targets that have been strongly reported on in the local press recently are Karamoko Dembele, John McAtee and Danny Armstrong. All three players possess different attributes and the arrivals of Dembele and Armstrong could hint at a shift to a 4-2-3-1 or a 3-4-3.

However, with Wanderers playing a 3-4-1-2 with Klaidi Lolos in the hole on both occasions so far this summer, it seems more likely that Dembele would be signed to play in the ‘one’ behind the strikers, as he did effectively at Blackpool last year, on loan from Stade Brest.

McAtee would be yet another forward, so the likelihood of getting more creative players in the team at the expense of one of the two strikers seems small, given that Bolton already have the likes of Dion Charles, Victor Adeboyejo, Collins and Dan Nlundulu.

Armstrong would be a different approach because the Scotsman, currently at Kilmarnock, has pretty much operated entirely as a winger. .

So, whilst the intent may well be to sign more adaptable, attacking and creative players for the final third; the reality is more likely to be simply a minor shift in which one of the central midfield players comes out in favour of a 3-4-1-2.

Ian Evatt’s hope for further Bolton fluency

Whilst Evatt, and now even new signing Scott Arfield, has rightly said that Bolton did good things last year. To get to where they ended up means that not everything was wrong and, in fact, the vast majority of things were right.

However, that does not mean that things were not wrong. It would be reasonable to suggest that, especially in the second-half of the season where Wanderers won just 11 games in 29 across all competitions and eventually slipped out of the top two before actually losing two of their three play-off matches, the positive results tended to come about when the handbrake was taken off or via moments of individual brilliance.

When chasing the game and urgency was required, Bolton produced some genuinely excellent performances to salvage points against Northampton Town, Barnsley and Portsmouth.

However, complacency and stodginess in possession a lot of the time allowed them to keep dropping fairly stupid points. That stodginess comes from a lack of fluency and options, perhaps even energy, to play quickly.

If Wanderers are to just simply switch to a 3-4-1-2, which seems likely, like they so desperately did against Oxford, it would surely be ‘more of the same’ – and the same from the rest of this calendar year would see them plummet from third down the table.