WANDERERS are eyeing another January midfield bargain in the form of Gillingham captain Kyle Dempsey.

It is understood at least one bid has been submitted for the 26-year-old, who is out of contract in the summer, as Ian Evatt looks to add extra strength to the heart of his team.

Dempsey has recently returned from a knee injury sustained in late November and was withdrawn from the squad to face Ipswich on Saturday with a tight hamstring.

But the creative Cumbrian has been an effective player at League One level for a few seasons with the Gills and Fleetwood – helping the latter reach the play-off semi-final in 2017.

He is also well known to Wanderers’ technical performance director, Chris Markham, through their time at Huddersfield Town in the Championship.

Charlton Athletic had a £200,000 bid turned down for Dempsey in July but Bolton hope to tempt Gillingham into cashing in this month, rather than risk losing the player for nothing in the summer.

Evatt is expected to wrap up the signing of Aaron Morley early this week after the 21-year-old completed a medical at the club earlier today.

The Bolton boss wants to strengthen his attack with two more signings and add more goalkeeping competition for Joel Dixon before the end of the month.

“There’s lots of hard work going on behind the scenes,” he said at his pre-Wycombe press conference. “We’ve agreed a fee and agreed terms with somebody who I believe is here today for his medical, which is going to be good news.

“Another one in the building, providing everything goes okay, and then we’ve got to work really hard on bringing in two or three more, which we are doing.

“There are conversations going on all the time. We are ready to go, but sometimes it becomes more complicated with the Covid scenario and people wanting to hang on to squad members as long as they possibly can.

“Some of these players have been playing regularly in these first teams so we’re waiting patiently but there will be a time where we have to make a decision and a call on whether we move on or not.

“For now, we have our targets, we are working really hard to bring them in. We know what the squad should look like come the end of January and what it will look like and it’s going to be pretty exciting.”

Evatt watched his side run Wycombe close at Adams Park in November and expects another physical game tomorrow night. But with home advantage he hopes to see the Whites play more on their own terms.

“When we played down there it was another hard luck story, another moral victory, which I can’t stand because we’ve had loads of those this season,” he said. “We know what Wycombe are like, we know what they’re going to do, we know what we’re going to come up against.

“They ask you so many questions defensively and we need to stand up to it, but we do also have to be us and get back to being us and I thought Tuesday was the first real signs of us controlling the game with the football again in a transitional game.

“We did well at Rotherham but it was very transitional and that’s something that we don’t really want or like. We prefer to have the ball, control the game with the ball and we did that at Hartlepool and hopefully we can do that tomorrow night.

“Playing at home suits us, a big open space, very good pitch and hopefully we can control the game with our possession and then take our chances which we will create.”