IAN Evatt admits some of his Wanderers squad would be near-impossible to replace at short notice should the club get an offer they could not refuse on deadline day.

While the Bolton boss and recruitment chief Chris Markham have established a back-up list of targets, to use in an emergency over the last few weeks, signing ready-made alternatives in certain positions would not be a straightforward task.

Evatt is comfortable that with the likes of Dion Charles signed to a new contract and Ricardo Santos settled at the club, there will be no need for panic stations on the final day of the window.

But he won't rest entirely easily until the 11pm deadline, as losing either of those two players over the last few months, he reasoned, would present him with a sizeable problem.

“There are parts of the Plan B that you can’t replace,” he told The Bolton News. “We have to be realistic.

“If someone signed Dion Charles for – and I am picking a pie-in-the-sky-number – £4-5million, how are we going to replace him, even with a huge pot of money?

“There isn’t another Dion Charles out there because if there was, those clubs would be after them.

“It is then about strengthening the entire squad and then hopefully finding someone that we can develop into another Dion, another Ricardo Santos, another George Thomason. Those type of players are the ones we have worked with and spent a lot of hours on the training ground alongside to help them become the players we thought they could be.

“It isn’t as easy as just reaching out and grabbing the next one.”

Charles was strongly linked with a move to the Championship – and both Stoke City and Watford have made regular checks on him since the start of the season.

The Northern Ireland international became the first Bolton player to bag 20 goals in 22 years last season and has already added four to this year’s tally.

His strike partner Victor Adeboyejo has also scored four, having scored 16 times in all competitions last season for Burton and Wanderers, and while he has taken some time to establish himself with the Whites, Evatt is optimistic that he has two players who are well capable of reaching the magic number this time around.

“I said to you pre-season when everyone was complaining that we were not scoring enough goals that we have a 20-goal-a-season striker, and everyone wants one of them,” he said.

“How many teams have two? At the moment we have two strikers who are on course for that total. So I think we are doing things right, it is on the right path, but it is definitely not easy to just click your fingers and bring the next one in.”