DAVID Wheater is out to avenge one of the lowest points of his Wanderers career this afternoon.

Trudging off the Craven Cottage pitch as a relegated team at the end of a disastrous 2015/16 campaign was an experience the big defender never wants to repeat.

Wanderers’ fate had been sealed a few weeks earlier at Derby County and Wheater admits the disappointment felt as the club faced up to life in League One drives him on to succeed this time around.

“It was a bad time, horrible in fact, and we’d known a few weeks before we were down,” he told The Bolton News. “It felt worse because I thought it was my last game for Bolton as well.

“You take the highs and lows in football but I don’t want that feeling ever again.

“I know we haven’t had a good start but we don’t want to end up back there again, walking off some other pitch and feeling like that. If we can keep picking up points, there’s no reason why we should.”

Phil Parkinson’s Whites return to West London propping up the table once again but recent performances suggest things are now looking up at last.

Four points from the last two home games have had a re-energising effect on a team which had been consigned in some quarters as relegation fodder.

“They were probably right to write us off because some of our performances were not good enough,” he said. “We weren’t scoring goals, we were conceding daft goals, and obviously we were going to get a bit of stick.

“But I think we’ve played a lot better in the last four or five games. We’ve started scoring goals again, and I think we defended pretty well against Sheffield Wednesday. If we keep going like that, hopefully we’ll be okay.”

Wheater is the only survivor of the last Bolton side to win at Fulham, when Ivan Klasnic’s goal settled an FA Cup fifth round clash in 2011.

“I remember the game,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter how long we have waited, we know we need a win right now so that’s what we’re aiming at.”