Ian Evatt believes captain Ricardo Santos's red card did not help Bolton Wanderers in their loss against Fleetwood Town and felt the dismissal of the skipper led to his side lacking ideas and energy.
Bolton went behind early on at Highbury Stadium to the Cod Army thanks to Ged Garner's early strike.
Eoin Doyle saw a first half effort disallowed for offside, before Wanderers went down to 10 men when Santos was shown a straight red card when he brought down Callum Morton on the edge of the box and appeared to be the last man.
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And Harrison Biggins fired in a quickfire brace shortly afterwards to inflict a defeat on Evatt's side and ensure Stephen Crainey won his first game as Cod Army interim boss with a 3-0 loss for Wanderers.
Evatt believes he needs to see the dismissal incident again before properly giving a view on if it should have been a straight red card for Santos, but admitted it did not help his side's cause.
But ultimately he felt his side did not do enough over the course of the 90 minutes to warrant three points against the Cod Army and wants to see a response from his side this weekend versus Accrington Stanley.
He said: "I need to see it again, I haven’t seen it at all. 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.
“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.
“Against the wind first half, I actually think we started okay. 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.
"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 options to change things drastically. 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.”
