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Ian Evatt looked back on his first year in charge at Bolton Wanderers and pledged: “We’ve only just begun!”
The Bolton boss had a steep learning curve in his first full season as a manager in the Football League, which started slowly but ended with the Whites grabbing promotion on the final day of last season.
All done in the grip of a pandemic, at a time when Wanderers’ new owners were helping to heal the wounds of administration, Evatt can say with hand on heart that his first 12 months in the hotseat was unique compared to that of his predecessors.
“It has definitely been a rollercoaster, hasn’t it?” he told the local press, in what has now become a regular gathering on Zoom.
“For some people, eyebrows were raised with a young manager, inexperienced, who has only managed for a couple of years. Some would say I had a lot to prove and at Christmas, probably even more so.
“But I think come the end of the season what we achieved as a group, as a team and as a football club in general both on and off the pitch speaks volumes to proving people wrong.”
Comparing Evatt to other modern-day managers who have guided Bolton to promotion – be it Phil Parkinson, Sam Allardyce, Bruce Rioch, Colin Todd or even Phil Neal – is practically impossible.
He currently has the fifth best win record of the lot, after his team secured third spot last season with an incredible late surge.
That he has done all that without the benefits – or indeed the pressures - of a passionate Wanderers support is completely unique. How paying patrons would have affected the League Two campaign is up for debate but the long-distance relationship seems in pretty good shape as he begins preparation for League One with the first pre-season friendly at Longridge next weekend, and a chance to meet just a few of those absent friends.
“I know everyone else had no fans but we were starting from scratch as a team,” Evatt said. “None of our players have met our supporters, with the exception of a few of the younger ones who we inherited. It is new to all of us.
“Everybody else, including myself, are brand new to it. And doing all that last season without supporters was difficult at times, especially in our own stadium.
“By the end of the season I felt we’d connected with the fans, connected with the town, there was a buzz around Bolton which was exactly what we wanted to create.
“You can see it in the season tickets, which have been great. Hopefully, we can keep selling those and once we hit that July 19 date and stadiums are fully open again, that will give people the confidence to buy tickets even more and come to the stadium because we need their support.”
At 39, Ian Evatt is the 12th youngest manager currently active in the EFL. There were times last season when the lack of experience was used as a stick to beat him by critics, as Wanderers badly underachieved in the first few months of his tenure.
Backed by the club’s owners when times got really tense at the end of 2020, Evatt now feels he is a better manager for having been put through the wringer.
“To be honest, I’ve got to say that I’ve enjoyed every minute of it and even the dark times, I was still learning so much,” he said. “I still have a long way to go and a lot to learn.
“You all know now how ambitious I am as a manager and I have a huge amount of self-belief and confidence, but I also know I’ve still got things to learn and I was kind of learning on the job still.
“But I said all the time Rome wasn’t built in a day and things take time, especially when you are starting from scratch like we were.
“Fortunately, we had another opportunity in January to recruit players and we got that right. Since then, the players really gelled and came together and improved.
“I’m delighted where they’re at. This week’s been our first week back and I’ve got to say I’m really happy with where they’re all at.”
After years of being held up against their will as the poster boys for poor ownership, Wanderers were rescued from the very brink by Football Ventures in 2019, emerging with aims to be a very different kind of club.
Evatt is convinced he can lead from the front.
“I think Bolton is a perfect club for me,” he said. “I think the fans are ambitious, they want this club to get back to where they believe it belongs and where I believe it belongs and that’s where I believe I belong long term.
“Our paths are aligned and our journeys align and that’s why I came to this football club, to be with Sharon on that journey and to be with the supporters and we want to do that together.
“I love this club, I love this job and I think we’ve only just begun, that’s all I can say really. We’ve got lots of work to do, we’re not resting on our laurels, we want more success and that starts now in pre-season getting prepared for League One next season.”
Evatt and his team earned widespread praise for the type of football they played in League Two last season – and one which may well catch Bolton’s supporters by surprise now that they are now watching games through the limited scope of iFollow.
After signing eight players this summer, including two returning stars in Declan John and Dapo Afolayan, Evatt says he will not be changing his approach now that the club has stepped up a level.
The Bolton boss has had just two days off this summer as he worked with technical performance director, Chris Markham, to whittle down a shortlist of talent. And as things stand, he is happy with the results.
“We just need to be bigger and better than what we’ve been so far,” he said. “The philosophy is not going to change, the fundamentals aren’t going to change, it is just being better at what we do in every department.
“Everyone keeps telling me about set pieces and I know we need to score more from set pieces, but we need to dominate possession better, we need to be more prolific and better with our final third entries and what we create from those final third entries. We need to keep tight at the back.
“We are in a bigger and better league and probably the only time it really sunk in on promotion was when I looked at the fixture list and this is a proper division with proper football clubs in it. There are big football clubs which are equal to ours and it Is exciting. Bring it on is what I say, we’re excited and looking forward to it.”
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