BEHIND any upwardly mobile football team there is a successful backroom staff, a group tasked with cultivating a winning environment and balancing a training ground ecosystem to gain the best possible results.

Front of house, manager Ian Evatt is the figurehead towards whom the praise – and the criticism – is most regularly aimed, the man who has final say on key decisions on the pitch, and the one whose head is ultimately on the block if things go wrong.

Now in his fourth year in charge, however, the team of supplementary staff is larger than ever.

When he arrived from Barrow in the summer of 2020, at the height of a global pandemic, he was joined by assistant Pete Atherton, first team analyst Lewis Duckmanton and goalkeeper/coach Matt Gilks. The skeletal staff used in that first season reflected accurately the uncertainty at Wanderers, and around the whole game at the time.

It was not until 12 months later, following promotion to League One, that Evatt was able to boost his coaching numbers, bringing in his former Chesterfield team-mate and Barrow lieutenant, Sam Hird.

The former Leeds United and Doncaster Rovers defender had been a close confident and had gained UEFA A and B badges in the latter years of his playing career. His first role was to guide the club’s initial attempts at a B Team through a patchy network of games in the Central League – itself only just recovering from Covid and the debilitating effect it had on the lower leagues.

After a restructure in 2022, Matt Craddock was brought in to guide the B Team, which now had an independent budget, and Hird was drafted full-time to the senior ranks to aid Evatt and Atherton in creating a side which could eventually aim for promotion from the Championship.

Hird quickly became a key influence, acting as a conduit between the small analysis team, Evatt and Atherton. And given the manager’s receptiveness to data and willingness to use it to shape his decision-making, the ability to break it down to the players in particular was an important skill.

Priorities on the training ground meant that no particular emphasis was attached to the coaching and break-down of attacking and defensive set pieces for the first 12 to 18 months of Evatt’s tenure but Hird was tasked with improving the team’s returns, and attacking statistics showed a marked increase in the second half of last season, which have continued to this day.

Two months into the new campaign, Wanderers now find themselves on the lookout for Hird’s replacement after he handed in his notice to take up a position with the PFA.

The well-regarded Matt Craddock has been promoted from the B Team for the time being but Evatt has promised a detailed search to find a coach who can bring the same intelligence and attention to detail that Hird displayed, along with new ideas of their own.

Wing-back Randell Williams paid tribute to the job Hird did in helping him settle from January onwards when he moved from Championship Hull City.

“For me, personally, Hirdy has been a big part of my journey,” he told The Bolton News. “He sits down with me every week, goes through every single clip, so I have nothing but the utmost respect for him. I’m happy I got the chance to play under him and wish him all the best wherever he goes.

“For the team he has been immense, especially for set pieces this year where I think we have been excellent, especially against the teams we came up against lately.

“Hirdy and the team around him, the other coaching staff, the analysts, they do a good job breaking all that information down and giving it to us players to use.

“He is not just good as a tactical manager, he is someone you can go and speak to as a person as well, talk to him about things going on in your life. It is great credit to who he is as a person.

“Who comes in next is down to the gaffer, I’m sure whoever it is will be suited to us.

“It is quite a family-based squad and I have no doubt whatsoever they will settle in quickly, it is that type of place.”

Evatt has found himself caught between two stools – pleased for a friend that he has found a secure and stable job, which also enables him greater freedom to enjoy family life, but also losing a trusted coaching ally who had been getting good results.

According to Opta, Wanderers have scored four goals from set pieces this season in League One and conceded three.

In an attacking sense, their XG from set plays is rated at 2.46, which means they have slightly over-achieved. But, on a more cautionary note, their defensive XG is 4.34, which in theory means they should have conceded more than they have done.

Up to February last season, Bolton were rooted to the bottom of the attacking set plays table, but there was a visible improvement in the variation thereafter.

Their work out-of-possession, in particular a more aggressive press introduced at the start of last season, also helped the club's impressive defensive record in 2022/23.

Evatt is confident the positive trend can continue and that the existing staff can combine with a data department which now boasts a specialist set piece analyst to improve results further.

“Sam has done a lot of work with the players individually,” he told The Bolton News. “Me and him have a lot of discussions about our out-of-possession set-up, our pressing identity and strategy, and we are always pretty much in agreement with the course of actions we take.

“The set piece stuff has been a group thing. What we’ll do is highlight with the data analyst strengths and weaknesses of the opposition, where we think the space might be, how we attack it. As a coaching group myself, Sam, Peter, Matt Gilks and the analysts will sit together and come up with a plan of what it might look like.

“We have similar set-ups with a few variations for a lot of different things now. You can see we are getting the benefit of that now.

“I don’t want to give too many secrets away but Tuesday and Stevenage was a prime example of that. It is very rare these days that people mark man-to-man, they normally have a packed zone and then a few disruptors, people who try to block etc, but they were strict man-for-man, with a one-man zone, so all we needed to do was work one block and then we’d free someone up.

“We managed to go that twice with Jack Iredale and once with Kyle Dempsey, where he nearly kicked the ball into Home Bargains.

“We have been quite successful with it this season, but it isn’t down to one person, it is a lengthy process and one we are taking seriously. We have learned it can help win us games.”

Back when Evatt and Co entered the building – socially distanced, of course – in July 2020, the prospect of hiring set piece analysts or supplementary coaching staff seemed a long way away.

While the finer details had to play second fiddle at the time to bedding down a style of play now considered to be ‘Brand Evatt’ – he is happy to now be able to offer a broader improvement to the team’s attacking threats.

“If you rewind three years, what I walked into compared with what we have now, it is night and day,” he said.

“At that time we were trying to develop an identity and you have to prioritise. There are only so many hours in a day so at that point we had to focus on the patterns of play, started with in-possession, the second year we developed more of a pressing strategy. Now, year on year, we are adding layers of detail on to both of those and with the staffing improvements and bringing in more data analysts, using the set play data and having more time as a group of staff to sit down and see what we can do better.”