JOSH Dacres-Cogley is looking forward to turning a fresh page in Wanderers' season.
With the exception of a handful of internationals, Ian Evatt’s squad will return to the training ground this morning to begin preparing for Saturday’s visit of Northampton Town.
Defeat against Carlisle United before the break still hangs heavy in the air, and with seven points to make up on the automatic promotion spots there will be strong expectation among Bolton fans to see a response from their team this weekend.
Ricardo Santos and Paris Maghoma should be available after injury and Gethin Jones has now served out his three-game suspension, which offers manager Evatt a few more selection options.
Dacres-Cogley is confident the team can find the consistency that has thus far eluded them this season.
“We want to be a team in the promotion mix and to do that you have to start stringing results together,” he told The Bolton News. “We’ve had that little bit of inconsistency right from the start of the season but we have to start making wins the theme, churning out the points.
“I honestly think this team can go on a long run, it definitely has that capability. But there are no excuses with how it has gone – we have dropped points that we shouldn’t have done and even when the team was missing a few of the lads we should have made sure that little run of results was protected.
“We start building another run now after the break and looking after the points.”
Wanderers play just three of their next nine league games at home, facing trips to the likes of Oxford United and Portsmouth on a tough run into December.
Disappointment over the previous result still lingers, and Dacres-Cogley accepts that Bolton’s claim to be automatic promotion challengers is being doubted in some quarters. But he believes a win and a positive performance against Northampton can lift the mood quickly.
“You have to put that behind you, refresh quickly,” he said. “You’ll maybe spend a few days thinking about certain things, but you have to be able to break it down, look at what went wrong and move on. You have to learn from your defeats.
“We know a lot of teams come to our ground and make sure they are hard to beat, rigid, that they stay in the game – just like Carlisle did. We just need to take it to them more. You can’t let them get a foothold in the game.
“Teams will try and frustrate and we probably need to deal with it a bit better. We need to put teams to the sword and let them know that we are a team that can be promoted this year, we need to show how good we are.
"I think we have the quality, but we need to show it week, in week out. That needs to improve.”
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