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Aaron Morley is ready to roll up his sleeves and fight to keep his starting spot at Wanderers during a busy December.
Back in Ian Evatt’s good books after a spell out of the reckoning in League One, the 22-year-old playmaker feels he is now back to top form.
Morley had started just one of 10 league games before being brought back in for the 0-0 draw at Cambridge United on November 12, and he kept his place for the 2-1 win at Fleetwood.
And while the competition remains fierce among Bolton’s midfield, Morley says he is ready to make the most out of his turn in the team.
“I am feeling back to my best now,” he told The Bolton News. “From the break I had I have just been getting my head down, working as hard as I possibly could, and the gaffer has put me back in now. Hopefully I have impressed him.
“Coming out of the side I was a bit frustrated at first. But I knew the other lads were putting in the work, I just had to push Demps, George and Kieran. It is a real group, I am not too disheartened if I am not in from the start, I just want the other players to do well.
“I think there are five or six midfielders that the gaffer struggles to pick from, so it just comes down to working the hardest on the training ground and hoping you get the shirt on the Saturday.”
Morley had not experienced such a long spell out of senior football since he first broke through at Rochdale but was determined to use the time wisely.
“I wanted to watch the other players and see what they did,” he said. “I watched what they did in training, then looked to be better than them every week.
“I’d been in the team at Rochdale since I was 18 or 19 but before that I was in the youth team and watching the pros, seeing how they worked day to day, learned from them.
“That’s the thing. We have such a big squad here, great players, so when the manager rotates it, you just have to back the ones who are in there and work hard. Hopefully the results will still be good.”
Wanderers left it late to win the game against Fleetwood, with some of their attacking players still looking short on confidence in front of goal.
Morley remains confident the problem will only be short term.
“It’s just the final touch, the final ball, the man being in the right spot,” he said. “But we work on it a lot in training and hopefully it will start happening again.
“We definitely have the quality. I think all the strikers can play, they can all score, whether it’s Dion, Kacha, Baka, Jon or Dapo, they can all do it. They just need to be in the right place.
“When strikers don’t score then it can affect confidence a bit, I think that just happens, but when you see them train every day and they are putting the goals away all the time it makes you feel confident it will happen in a game.”
The late drama at Fleetwood makes Morley think last weekend was a well-timed break for some of the players involved – but he is now looking forward to facing Bristol Rovers this Friday under the UniBol lights.
“Everyone is feeling good at the moment,” he said. “We have been knuckling down on the training ground, working hard, and hopefully that means we can carry things on from what we did at Fleetwood because I think it was a good performance.
“At the start it looked like it wasn’t going to be our day. We’d created numerous chances but we just couldn’t put one in the back of the net. But when Conor scored it pushed us over the edge to go and get the next one.
“We have just got our schedule through now for December and it is very busy. We are in training most days, got games every couple of days, so I think the rest has come at a good time. But we are raring to go now.”
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