Bolton Wanderers boss gets inside scoop on Evatt's Blackpool

Watching video clips of the Seasiders brought back familiar vibes for some of the Bolton squad at a team meeting on Friday – and they hope to use it to their advantage as they welcome the former boss back to the Toughsheet for the first time since he left the club in January last year.

Schumacher reckons the likes of Josh Sheehan, George Johnston, Kyle Dempsey and Eoin Toal will have nothing to prove to Evatt – who spent four-and-a-half years at the helm.

“I don’t think they will,” he told The Bolton News. “What they have been good for me, certainly this week, has been understanding the movement patterns and the shape and the ideas and the messages that Ian likes to work to.

“They played a system here that was effective and it was difficult to play against because of the rotation and the movement.

“All the lads that have played for a long time under Ian, the messages and the pictures I've shown them today, they've seen it a thousand times before.

“They're important, they'll understand. When they're going up against their old manager, they know how motivated he'll be. But for them, nothing changes. It's another game of football and it's three points that we're trying to win.”

Schumacher swapped notes early on with Evatt after he was appointed with the club sitting just outside the play-off positions in League One last season.

“Within the first week we spoke at length for a good 20 minutes and he gave me the heads up, he wished us well,” he said.

“He told me about what to expect at the club. He knew how passionate the fanbase are, how well-supported it is. He told me about the pressures that it comes with, which I was obviously aware of, even from the outside looking in you're aware of them.

“But we get on, apart from when he whacked us 4-0 (in the Papa Johns Trophy final).

“It’s not like we're best of mates and we speak to each other all the time. But there's definitely no animosity or anything like that, because when one manager gets sacked and another manager comes in, you obviously, in this case, want to wish them well, which he did.

“I'm sure he enjoyed his time here, I know it didn't end the way he wanted it to end and not get that promotion to the Championship that they probably deserved in the seasons when they just missed out. But as I say, football moves on, and on Saturday it's two different teams going at each other.”

The aim for Schumacher, as it was for Evatt in his time in charge, is to make Bolton a Championship club.

That task has become harder over the last seven days as draws at Lincoln and Reading saw the Whites drop off the automatic promotion pace.

But Schumacher maintains that there is still time for the situation to change.

“The objective at the start of the season was to get promoted, that's been the objective here for a good few years now,” he said.

“That hasn't changed, we're still in the hunt, we're not out of it, it's not dead and buried.

“We've got a lot of work to do if we're going to get automatically promoted, because the other two teams are being really consistent, they're both playing to a level at the moment that is automatic promotion form.

“We're just below that level because we've had a couple of draws here and there, too many draws in fact, we haven't lost that many games, not significantly lower than them two, but we've drawn too many.

“That's why we're playing catch-up, but we won't give in. We've got to keep believing that if we can sort out our own business and keep winning, that they will drop points, either of them.

“Everyone keeps mentioning Lincoln, but they are only a couple of points behind Cardiff, so we just keep believing that they might slip up, and if they do, capitalise.”

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