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Promotion advantage may have slipped away after Saturday’s draw against Portsmouth – but Ian Evatt says the fight is far from finished.
Wanderers are four points behind Derby County and must now win their game in hand against Shrewsbury on Tuesday night to keep pressure on their rivals going into the penultimate round of games in League One.
Aaron Collins’s header ensured Pompey did not secure promotion, nor the league title, at the Toughsheet Stadium, where a battling performance was not rewarded with a result which would have kept the Whites in control of their own top two fate.
Wanderers are now looking for a favour from Cambridge United next weekend but must first reduce the gap back to a single point with victory against the Shrews. A massive crowd of 25,738 produced a partisan atmosphere on Saturday – and the Bolton boss is now hoping it can be replicated again under the lights in midweek.
“We haven’t lost anything yet,” he told The Bolton News. “We are still fighting, and we will continue to fight, but what we need is for every single person who was in that stadium to turn up on Tuesday and go again.
“This game of football has a habit of shocking and surprising. We have to make sure that we are in the position to take advantage of any twists and turns.
“Strange things happen, and we have two home games now against teams we know will come here and fight, give us nothing.
“We need to lift the players, all of us, we all have a part to play. If we can get it down to a point then Derby are away from home next weekend, we are at home against Port Vale, anything can still happen.
“We know a victory against Portsmouth would have kept it in our own hands but getting a point just means now that Derby can’t afford to draw, they have to win both games.
“We have to do the business too. We didn’t get the result we wanted here but I can’t be too critical of the players because they gave absolutely everything.”
Wanderers had 19 shots on goal against a Pompey side who now need just one more point to seal promotion, and three for the title. Five of those shots were on target and, not for the first time this season, Evatt was left reflecting on a game where his side felt their performance had warranted more than it gained.
“We have had this conversation before and we’re one of the leading scorers in the country, I think we’re second in this division, and yet we feel like we could have scored so many more,” he said.
“That is part of the evolution. We need to be more clinical and ruthless.
“I don’t think we created necessarily much more when scored five against Reading or Oxford but on those days we were clinical, and here, we weren’t.
“The level of performance is what I look at and when you perform that way you should win games but today we haven’t done.”
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