Ian Evatt identifies issue he must solve at Bolton Wanderers for the 2022/23 season | OneFootball

Ian Evatt will analyse how they do things during pre-season, with the Bolton Wanderers manager highlighting the issue that his side have started the last couple of campaigns rather slowly.

Bolton accumulated just 19 points from their first 16 games of their League One season, with the Trotters ending the campaign in excellent form.

The same can be applied to their League Two promotion campaign, where it was their brilliance in the second half of the season that earned them an eventual spot in the higher division.

Speaking to The Bolton News, Evatt highlighted this issue of starting the season slowly: “We’ll look at things all of the time and obviously analyse what we do pre-season and how we do it.

“My Barrow team was the same, the season we won the league we had I think seven points from the first nine games and we ended up going on to win the league, so there’s something we need to look at there, no doubt.

“But I do think the circumstances here in particular has gone against us with that and I’ll explain why. The first season we had more or less zero players so we had to recruit a whole new squad, I was new, a whole new way of playing, not only having to educate the players on what was expected but the supporters and the fanbase because it’s different to what Bolton teams have played in the not so distant past.

Quiz: 24 facts every Bolton Wanderers supporter should know about their club – Can you score full marks?

1 of 24

In what year was Bolton Wanderers founded?

1874 1878 1882 1886

“This season, because of the salary cap last year, it affected our recruitment in the summer in particular in terms of we could only spend what we could within the salary cap last season, so obviously when you’ve got earners at the top end of that cap and you have to fill the squad with players that have potential but aren’t going to consistently perform at the levels needed to win in League One and once we got all of those injuries, those players were having to step up to the plate and just weren’t ready for it.”

Developing a knack for thriving during the second half of the campaign, if Bolton are able to address their early-season form, then they could enjoy an excellent campaign.

As Evatt states, they are going to be looking at pre-season tweaks that will better prepare themselves for yet another competitive season in England’s third-tier.

Whether that is intensifying training to ensure that they are at the levels required for the start of the new campaign remains to be seen, but ultimately, last season gave the Trotters a platform to build upon.