IN 25 years at Bolton Wanderers, only one manager has really left the club completely under his own steam.

I can still recall the buzz of the newsroom lasted for days after Sam Allardyce’s resignation in 2007 and most supporters will recall where they were the exact moment they heard the story confirmed.

Big Sam had been in charge for seven-and-a-half years, and it was difficult to fathom how Bolton would operate without him. His fingerprints were on every single aspect of the club, and though many other people helped build the Premier League legacy he left behind, it showed in the disorderly months that followed that he was the glue holding it all together.

Since he walked out, however, eight different men have occupied the hotseat. Six have been fired by the club, one – Phil Parkinson – was effectively beaten into submission by events outside his control, and one, Ian Evatt, remains.

The four years and four months served by the current boss is an impressive stint in modern football. Watford, to use one of the more extreme examples, have had nine different permanent managers since he came to the club in July 2020, and Sunderland are on their sixth.

Evatt is also arguably the only person post-Big Sam who has been able to truly shape the club to his own taste. He had no choice, there was practically nothing here when he walked through the doors!

Looking back, Gary Megson was certainly granted the biggest budget of anyone in the list, but a good chunk of his time was also spent stabilising the madness he inherited. When it came to pushing on and evolving into something more, that is where he struggled.

Though Owen Coyle still spent some big money, he did find himself scaling down a budget, as did Dougie Freedman and Neil Lennon.

Parkinson picked up a club in League One with a big wage bill and serious issues behind the scenes. He did well to get promotion and performed miracles to stay up in the first year back in the Championship; we all know what happened after that.

Keith Hill took on an impossible task and was shunted at a time when nobody really knew what the future would hold for Bolton Wanderers, or football in general. But out of the ashes of the pandemic, Evatt took possession of what was effectively a blank canvass.

Building the club up from practically nothing was a much tougher job than some people realise. And I certainly don’t subscribe to the theory that promotion in League Two was a given. Not only were there major issues to negotiate inside the club – a certain head of football operations, for example - but the game’s governance was also in a mess too, and it limited what could be realistically achieved in the early stages.

Once returned to League One, the club and its ownership always had a finite grace period where the rebuilding process could be completed, and folk would start to look towards the future. Whereas the Papa Johns Trophy finally felt like a good place to turn the page, their Wembley return in May was supposed to the be start of the next chapter.

From there onward it has been a hard sell. Optimism has gradually given way to pessimism, the fans no longer bothered about the journey, just the destination. The board have thrown their backing behind Evatt to take the club a step further, but I think it is fair to say now that a large number of people are questioning that call.

The manager is desperate to show he can fulfil his own prophecy and lead Bolton to promotion. He has poured everything into the job, make no mistake, and it galls me to read some of the personal abuse and bile aimed his way at times. It is possible to disagree with his principles, dislike his character, even, but folk forget there is a person, and his family involved here too.

Evatt believes he can win back the support he has lost. I can only say that in the examples I have witnessed before him there has been a similar tipping point to last Saturday, and none of those men were able to recover.

Each example followed similar lines, personal pride hurt by criticism from the terraces, professional pride hurt by players not performing to the levels they require. Some realise the fight is lost quickly, some battle on to the bitter end.

I have said many times that Evatt is a survivor and to turn around what has been a wretched 2024 to find success in 2025 would definitely be the most impressive feat of managerial durability I have seen in this job.

Some feel he is beyond the point of no return, that the weight of play-off failure is simply weighing too heavily on the shoulders of the manager and his players. Performances like the one at Stockport back up that argument and mask a lot of the good work that had happened in the previous month.

Calls for change won’t go away even if Bolton return after the international break with a win against Blackpool. If the manager and his players learn nothing from the next 10 days, it is that they must anticipate this being a long, slow road back to the good books, if they make it there at all.