IAN Evatt has appealed for fans to stick with Wanderers in what he predicts could be a rocky ride before the transfer window reopens.

Bolton made a poor start to their December fixtures with a 3-0 defeat at struggling Fleetwood Town on Tuesday night.

Evatt is planning to bring in new players in January to boost a squad which has been hit hard by injuries to key players like Gethin Jones, Lloyd Isgrove, MJ Williams, Amadou Bakayoko and Josh Sheehan.

Such are the paucity of options at his disposal, the Wanderers boss says he cannot risk damaging spirits further by criticising the Fleetwood display too strongly.

“I have to be really careful because we can’t knock their confidence any more than what it already is knocked and we haven’t got the players to change things drastically at the moment,” he said. “We are going to have a really turbulent month and it’s going to be tough as a football club.

“I’ve said this the last couple of weeks that even though we’ve had some decent results, we need to stick together and in times and nights like this, we’ve got to stick together as a football club.”

Evatt had predicted the conditions would play a major part at Fleetwood in his pre-match press conference and club skipper Ricardo Santos also reasoned that the team would have to find a way to “win ugly”.

But after falling behind to Ged Garner’s sixth minute strike, Bolton struggled badly in both halves to play in the strong wind and rain.

“Against the wind first half, I actually think we started okay,” Evatt said. “In their first attack, they scored and that just knocks everybody’s belief and confidence.

“Even though we rallied a little bit and probably had the better opportunities in the first half, we just didn’t do enough and we didn’t do enough second half.

“We looked like we lacked ideas at times, and then when the sending off happens, we then looked devoid of ideas and energy. That hurts.”

Evatt had yet to re-watch the incident which led to Ricardo Santos receiving a straight red card from ref Seb Stocksbridge but he said problems were already evident before his side were reduced to 10 men.

“Obviously that didn’t help things and maybe the change didn’t really help either. We didn’t really look like creating. That was the problem,” he said.

“We had a couple of half bits in the second half where we probably should have done better, but we didn’t have the weight of pressure that I thought we would have. We have to go again on Saturday.”