DION Charles nearly missed Saturday’s game at Reading after being bitten by a mysterious insect whilst on international duty with Northern Ireland.

Ian Evatt revealed that the striker suffered a reaction to the bite, which occured whilst playing for his country against Kazakhstan in a Euro qualifier in Astana, with his leg balooning up in the build up to the weekend.

Charles recovered in time to face the Royals and scored his sixth goal of the season but a bad week got worse as Reading scored twice in the last 13 minutes to snatch the points, all after Evatt had been forced to take him off because of a shoulder injury.

Wanderers are now sweating over their top-scorer’s fitness ahead of Saturday’s game against Peterborough United.

“It doesn’t look great,” Evatt admitted. “Fortunately it is not dislocated, it is what’s called an AC joint, which is basically the ligament which holds the shoulder in place.

“We don’t know how bad that it but the pain for unbearable for him.

“How it happened, he should score, but when he doesn’t it should be a penalty because he has been absolutely scythed.

“I honestly don’t know if he will miss games – we’re hopeful he won’t – but it was one of those injuries where it might be about pain management and how much he can cope with next week.

“I didn’t want to bring him off. He looked sharp, effective, and he’d had a nasty infection in his ankle this week – we don’t really know the source of it but we think he was bitten by something in Kazakhstan and his whole leg was swollen at one stage. It didn’t look like he was going to play at all, so we did well to get him out there.

“It was his decision to come off in the end but we certainly did not want to take him off.”

Evatt was unhappy that Charles did not get a penalty after it appeared he had been tripped by Tyler Bindon when through on goal – which would almost certainly have also resulted in a red card for the Reading defender.

“I thought the consistency for the yellow cards given today just wasn’t there,” he said. “Every time we made challenges we seemed to get a yellow card, every time they did – similar or worse – they did not get yellow cards.

“The one big decision, Dion Charles clean through, to give nothing was absolutely crazy.

“But that game was down to us, not down to any officiating.”

Victor Adeboyejo spurned two big first-half chances to add to the four goals he has scored this season.

The Bolton boss stood by the striker, however, and believes he will bounce back quickly from the disappointment.

“I thought his general play was really good, the best we have probably seen from him,” he said. “I thought him and Dion looked a real handful and we created some really good chances.

“Victor will be the first to say he should have taken one of those. Again, we have to back the players and trust them to do the business, and I trust Victor to score goals. Today it didn’t happen but the pleasing thing was that today his general game was very good.”