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The march to Wembley starts here for Wanderers, and Ian Evatt has vowed to make every second count in the build-up to the Papa Johns Trophy final.
Buoyed by a hard-earned point at league leaders Sheffield Wednesday on Friday night, the Bolton boss will give his non-international players a couple of days off before the big push begins for April 2.
James Trafford, Eoin Toal, Conor Bradley and Dion Charles are all away representing their country and will join up with the squad early next week.
But in the meantime, Evatt sees an opportunity to work on an impressive performance against Sheffield Wednesday which, if replicated at Wembley, would give them an excellent chance of lifting some silverware.
“We have a lot of work to do,” he said. “There is a lot of best practice stuff that we have to get through.
“We did a lot of work this week on our in-possession stuff, the build phase and controlling the ball, managing it better. We had been too transitional in recent weeks.
“We have given it away far too cheaply and when you try to play openly and expansively, that causes you problems. When you give the ball away, you are wide open.
“I thought (at Sheffield Wednesday) we were a lot better. We were not afraid to recycle the ball, work them, then go out the other side. It ends up being a slow death for the opposition at times, and towards the end of the game I thought the whole thing was going to come to fruition, unfortunately it didn’t quite happen.
“But what I know is that if we play like that for the rest of the season we will have no problems whatsoever. That really looked like a team that we built.”
Evatt had words of praise for captain, Ricardo Santos, at Hillsborough. And the Bolton boss was happy with the way his defence responded to the early pressure which had been put upon them.
“Rico was outstanding,” he said. “It is a really challenging task being a defender in our team, you have to build, you have the ball, you have to be confident, you have to almost stand on the ball and trigger their press because we want to control their press rather than theirs control us and that takes real bravery, especially in a cauldron like Sheffield Wednesday.
“All my defenders did it terrifically well. We invited them in at times, broke free and then switched out the other side.
“There were times in the first half – but most of the second half where they just sacrificed and went into a mid-to-low block, allowing us to control the tempo of the game.
“To do that at Hillsborough is particularly pleasing.”
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