OWEN Beck isn’t yet ready for first team football at Bolton Wanderers – but Ian Evatt says it will not be long before fans see what the Liverpool youngster can do.

Signed the day before deadline day on loan for the season, the Wales Under-21 international has not played competitively since December 2021, when he turned out for the Reds against Leicester City in the Carabao Cup.

A loan move to Portugal in the summer had been designed to get him regular football but after it failed to materialise, Wanderers were seen as a better option by his parent club.

Evatt has put the youngster on a special training programme to catch him up with the rest of the group and says he is now making progress.

“He’s getting there,” said the Bolton boss. “Physically, he wasn’t where we needed him to be because playing wing-back for me is probably the most difficult position, it is the most physically demanding and you have to be really, really fit.

“I think he was not at the required level but I think he’s getting there fast and I think the last couple of days training have done him the world of good and I’m starting to see what he can really do now, which is really good.”

Wanderers fans are keen to see if Beck can have the same sort of impact as his best mate, and Anfield team-mate Conor Bradley has had on the right side of the team.

But with Declan John and Jack Iredale splitting game time at left wing-back, it has not been easy to see which route the youngster would take into the line-up.

Asked what attributes Beck has compared with the other two options in the squad, Evatt said: “I think Jack’s more of a defensive type, even though he’s got real quality with his passing and his crossing, as we saw on Saturday, he is a progressive passer. He can feed the ball into really good areas with a lovely left foot.

“Declan is more of an attacking wing-back. He is a linker, he is a connector, he can come inside, he can dribble, he can combine with fast combinations.

“Then Owen is probably a hybrid of the two, where he can press intensely and aggressively – because that is the Liverpool way and how they coach their full-backs - but he can dribble inside, he can dribble outside, and he can cross as well.

“They are all different in so many ways but all have similar characteristics as well and it’s how we balance that out throughout the season.”

Evatt has also hinted he could use Iredale elsewhere in the line-up as a way of getting Beck into the squad.

“We have got the option to play Jack as a left centre-back,” he said. “George is doing brilliantly well at the minute, but he has played a lot of football and it is going to be hard for a young lad to play all of the games all of the time, so we can still utilise Jack in that position as well.”