Evatt turns spotlight on 'underperformers' after Stockport nightmare

As the pressure piled once more on Ian Evatt following Saturday’s dismal 5-0 defeat at Stockport County, the Bolton boss has delivered a damning verdict on “underperforming” players in his squad.

Wanderers dropped to 10th as a result of the heaviest defeat of his four-year and four-month reign, which left some supporters calling him to be sacked after the final whistle.

Though Evatt apologised for the result and the performance, he also referenced issues within his squad, and areas of behaviour on the training ground which require improvement.

“We have had an honest conversation in there, which initially the players led, and it is about time they started telling each other the truth,” he told The Bolton News. “It is about time.

“There are some players in there that are underperforming and some players in there that aren’t doing what are required to do, day-in, day-out, as a professional football player. It is your job to do the right things.

“In football sometimes, and I was one for 21 years, everyone wants to make excuses, everyone wants to look at everyone else and play the blame game. You have to be honest with yourself, that is where it starts.

“I will ask myself, the staff will ask themselves, the player should ask themselves, are they doing everything within their power to make sure we are doing the right things on a daily basis because it all has a material impact.

“The standards in training, the standards on the training ground, the standards off the pitch, it all relates and correlates to Saturdays and some need to do it better, simple as that.”

Asked if he would look towards January to try and rectify the problems he had highlighted, Evatt added: “We will have a look at that and see if we can get better and improve the squad because, clearly, there are parts of the squad that need improving.”

Wanderers had won six of their previous seven games, which also came after a heavy home defeat to Huddersfield Town in mid-September.

Prior to the game, Evatt had hoped to meet his target of 10 points from a five-match block but ultimately fell one short as his side produced a wretched display against another neighbouring club.

He said: “We talked before the game about having tried to build some momentum into the season and to build some confidence and that takes a long time to do – but it can leave you in a heartbeat, in a moment, and today it clearly left us and it feels like all the hard work we have done over the last six or seven weeks has gone back to square one again.”

Addressing the section of supporters who stayed after the whistle to voice their displeasure and call for him to be removed from the job, Evatt added: “All I can do is stand here and apologise for that performance, apologise for that result. It isn’t good enough or accepted.

“But singing about the football that we play, we have had a lot of success over five years, so I find that a bit strange. I understand people are frustrated and very disappointed and I am at the front of that queue. We apologise, it is not good enough, it is not what we have built over time here, and we need to reflect and come up with solutions to get better.”

Source

Same old BULLSHIT from EVANS.

It's hard to know what he's saying - as I assume he's not telling Iles everything - more fool him if he is.

Is he saying he's lost the dressing room - the players are no longer responding to him?

Is he saying he's made some bad signings?

Is he saying his coaches are crap when he isn't there?

Is he just making up an excuse and none of it is true as he doesn't really know what to say to Iles?


Whatever it is, it isn't the best thing to go public about.

Why not just say I got the tactics badly wrong for this, we were short of players due to injury and that was compounded by players who had to play still suffering from a bug going around on the camp.

With Cogley being one of the worst sufferers, I thought it best if we went 5 at the back and defend deep as I was expecting Stockport to come on to us anyway after their midweek 5-0 drubbing.

Unfortunately that turned out to be the worst thing I could have done as it gave them exactly what they wanted.

Our system did in fact hold for the first half coming in just one down but we collapsed at the start of the second half partly due to the ill players being fatigued.  It quickly became 4-0 down and the game had then gone from us.

I did bring Cogs and others who had been ill all week and replaced them with players returning from injury themselves simply to give them game time and we lasted out nearly to the end of the game when an error gifted them the fifth.

Obviously I apologise and am gutted but I did what I thought was best for the club and players in the circumstances we had leading up to the game but we were simply beaten by the much stronger team on the day.


Now all that might all be BULLSHIT too but it is far more convincing than what he said don't you think?


To my mind there clearly is a problem within the team and I don't know whether it is the players or the system or something other - but all isn't well at Tough Sheet Towers, I feel.

The team will probably bounce back from this, but I don't see Evatt as a manager who will get us  promoted. 

He is very stubborn and does not seem to learn from his mistakes.

I think he needs to go, but I don't have the knowledge of which managers are available to replace him.

I know BIG SAM has retired, but I often wonder how he would set up the team if he was in the hot seat again.

I'm a bit like you Cajun in that I don't follow which managers are in or out of jobs but I did see that Mark Robbins surprisingly got sacked at Coventry a few days back and that Steven Schumacher who led Plymouth out of our division as Champions the season before last with 101 points is also recently out of work also.

So I guess there are some decent managers currently looking for the right opportunity - and I would say with the squad we currently have that we are a great opportunity waiting for someone - but whether the job will come free anytime soon is a different question altogether.

Fwiw I think Evatt has hit a brick wall with his system in that his system does work say 80% of the time but he simply doesn't have an answer for the other 20% when it doesn't.

He can't seem to accept that the one size fits all, tippy tappy system he has gone all in for, simply doesn't fit all the opponents styles we come up against.

There seems to generally be two distinct philosophical styles of manager, the Evatt ones of we will play our way and let the opposition worry about us, or the pragmatic way of analysing your opponents strengths and weaknesses and setting up your team to limit their strengths and maximise their weaknesses.  

I was always in the latter camp myself, mainly because I always played in teams that weren't very good and you had to use your brains because we weren't going to blow them off the field and they were more likely to stick ten past us!

I might not have won much during my football career but I did get a lot of practice having to work out ways to plug the holes in my team and to be creative in order to be as competitive as we possibly could (and man management in keeping players heads up throughout the game when we were getting tanked).

Happy days.