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Ian Evatt has vowed to get to the bottom of Wanderers’ desperately disappointing defeat at Leyton Orient.
The Bolton boss brings his players back together at Lostock this morning to review what he felt was the worst 90 minutes of the season.
Evatt gave no excuses for the result – which leaves his side fourth in the table and four points off the automatic promotion slots. And he feels his players will need little reminder that their performance was nowhere near top two quality.
“It is very simple, we need to be better than that,” he told The Bolton News. “We know what a good performance looks like, what is right, and we know what is wrong. And that was very wrong.
“We are a team that really focusses on our processes and practice and this week it has been very challenging to get any practice, given the weather and conditions. But it has been the same for absolutely everyone.
“Things are not always going to be perfect for us. We won’t always have things our way.
“So now we have to look hard at why that happened and how we put it right for Tuesday night and Cheltenham.”
Wanderers travelled to the game after match officials gave the playing surface at Brisbane Road the provisional thumbs up on Friday afternoon. Another check was made on Saturday morning, which revealed no issues whatsoever.
After four straight wins in the league and an excellent display against Luton Town in the FA Cup the previous Tuesday, Evatt said the slump caught him by surprise.
“I didn’t see it coming,” he said. “All the stuff about ‘is it on or off’ it isn’t an excuse. We have to be more professional than that. We have to make sure we are ready to play regardless.
“By the way we played, we probably weren’t and that is strange to say the least.
“We are not going to look and find excuses. That was us not performing at the level we should have done and we have to look at why that was the case.”
Dion Charles wasted two big opportunities either side of the Orient goal, and just as it had at Portsmouth, the profligacy had a negative effect on the team overall.
“It was twice as bad because there was two of them,” said Evatt. “But we have to be mentally tougher than that.
“I think after the goal we started to play at the right tempo and intensity. Obviously we lacked quality at times and it was too late – we’d missed the chance to restart and reset at half time.
“The first 10 minutes of the second half was awful and nobody could deny that goal was coming. It was down to our mistakes and errors and we made a really bad mistake between two of our better players, which is not like them, we’re behind and chasing the game, and we know their record when they go in front.
“We had a chance to get level and if we had taken it, maybe we would have changed our ways a little bit? We didn’t, so we have to take our medicine and focus on getting better for Tuesday.”
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