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An injury to Declan John on Friday sent Ian Evatt’s plans for the derby sideways.
The Welsh wing-back pulled out of the squad 24 hours before the game with a back injury and may now miss this week’s games against Portsmouth and Sheffield Wednesday.
Evatt had planned to play Gethin Jones in the back three on his return to the side but the Bolton boss admits he had to make some last-minute alterations.
“It’s great to have Gethin back available because we have been a little bit light all of a sudden at the wing-back area again with Izzy’s injury and Marlon’s injury,” he said.
“Declan hurt his back yesterday in training so we’ve managed to somehow get Gethin back to wing-back and Sads playing wing-back and I thought he did okay today.
“I don’t know how long Declan will be. With back injuries, you never know how quickly they settle.
“It is in the hands of Declan and the physios to see how quickly we can get it to calm down and enable him to play again.”
Evatt was disappointed with the start Bolton made to the game at Wigan, with the atmosphere potentially getting to some of his players on the day.
“I think we were really disappointed with the first half and hour and we looked nervy and on edge, but we have to remember that some of these boys, it’s the first real derby they’ve played in,” he said. “The type of team we are, you have to show real confidence in possession even when you’re being pressed and take the ball and have control with possession and we didn’t do it well enough in the first half an hour.
“But once we wrestled that control and we started to build belief with passes and possession, we wrestled back the game in the last 10 minutes of the first half. We looked better and that then gave us some belief and confidence at half-time to go again second half and the impact off the bench that the boys gave us was incredible.”
Evatt was delighted, however, with his trio of second-half substitutes Jon Dadi Bodvarsson, Amadou Bakayoko and Kyle Dempsey, who helped turn the game in Bolton’s favour towards the end.
“I thought Demps and Jon in particular were outstanding when they came on,” he said. “They gave us some freshness and impetus. I was really pleased and we’ve more or less completely dominated the second half. It was a point well deserved.”
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