Opportunites are arising at Bolton Wanderers owing to injuries and suspensions and the players must take them, Ian Evatt has said.
Wanderers are back in action tomorrow evening on the road against Plymouth Argyle and aiming to bounce back from their loss to Wigan Athletic over the weekend.
The Latics took the lead in the first half when Will Keane slotted home early on to put Leam Richardson's side ahead at the break.
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Wanderers nearly equalised through skipper Antoni Sarcevic just after the break, but Wigan struck back with a fabulous strike from James McClean.
Callum Lang added a third before McClean scored Wigan's fourth to compound Bolton's misery.
Gethin Jones is out injured, while Kieran Lee and Declan John are injury doubts, while Ricardo Almeida Santos is suspended for the trip to Home Park after picking up his fifth yellow card of the season.
And Evatt wants his players to take opportunities now there are ones on offer, and does not want to hear complaints from them if they do not take the chances when given.
He said: “We just need to get back to what we have been for the majority of this season. Get back to playing our way, believing in the way we play.
"Obviously with the injuries we’ve got and suspensions now that there’s opportunities for people and they have to stand up and take those opportunities. There’s no good knocking on my door saying ‘I want to play and why am I not playing?’ when you’re given the opportunity and you don’t take it.
“They need to take it and they need to stand up and we need to react as a group. We need to stick together. There isn’t one person involved in this football club that won’t be hurting tonight, but it’s about going home, analysing what we could have done better.
"Did we do enough? How have we performed and if we haven’t performed to how we expect, then we need to look at that and come back bigger, better and stronger and that includes me.
“We’ve all got to take a long hard look at each other and go again. It doesn’t mean we’re a bad team. We’ve suffered a really heavy defeat and a bad result against our biggest rivals but we’ve done a lot of good things so far this season and this club has come a long way in a short period of time and sometimes on the back of results like this, you can lose sight of how far we’ve come.
“There’s always going to be bumps in the road. Today we’ve hit a big one, but in the face of adversity we need to come back bigger, better and stronger and hopefully we can do that on Tuesday.
“It doesn’t get any easier against a team top of the league and flying high, with a really long journey.
“We will keep it all in house and go again on Tuesday.”
