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Wanderers finished last year as the clean sheet kings of English football – and Ian Evatt believes they will once again provide the foundation for success in 2024.
No other side came close to the 30 clean sheets that Bolton chalked up in all domestic competitions last season, with Lincoln City and Ipswich Town second on the list with 24.
Monday’s 1-0 win against Burton Albion opened this year’s account and came courtesy of a new-look back three which contained Will Forrester alongside Ricardo Santos and Eoin Toal.
Gethin Jones’s international call-up for Australia has forced Evatt to make a change at the back but the Bolton boss remains confident that performances will not be affected.
“I have no doubt that Will could step in and do exactly what he has done,” he told The Bolton News.
“He is a very good young player who has been excellent since he came to the club, and I think he is going to improve too.
“We defend as a team, our pressing is as a team unit, but Nathan (Baxter) and the defenders are doing really well. I saw a stat the other day which said we had kept the most clean sheets during 2023 in the whole of England, and we are proud to have that sort of thing associated with us.
“Hopefully now we can keep keeping those clean sheets in the second half of the season because we know there are goals in this team.
“If we can keep the door shut then the attacking players we have in this team will always give us a chance of winning the game.”
Evatt felt the performance of former Burton striker, Victor Adeboyejo, summed up the hard work which has gone into his team’s defensive record.
Wanderers have the lowest PPDA (passes per defensive action) in League One – a metric which measures the effectiveness of a team’s pressing strategy by counting the number of passes allowed outside their own defensive third.
And whilst Adeboyejo’s goal return has not yet hit the heights he would have hoped, the Wanderers boss is more than happy with what he contributes elsewhere.
“We have discussed Victor a lot and some of the hard work he does outside of scoring goals goes unnoticed and unrecognised at times, I think,” he said.
“He works his socks off – they all do, in fact – Jon (Dadi Bodvarsson) does the same sort of thing, Cameron (Jerome) helps us see out games, Dion (Charles) just never stops.
“It is the team work ethic and that is why we are able to keep clean sheets.”
Another development which emerged after the Burton game was that referee Darren Drysdale included in his report mention of a laser pen used by a member of the home crowd.
Use of the pointers is illegal in stadia and have led to heavy fines and bans in the past.
Meanwhile, Jones has arrived in Abu Dhabi for the start of Australia’s pre-tournament camp, which will also involve a friendly game against Bahrain on Saturday evening.
The Socceroos play their first game of the Asian Cup against India on January 13 at the Al-Rayyyan Stadium – the venue at which former Wanderers loanee Rodrigo Moreno now plays his club football.
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