Evatt urges Bolton players to embrace the challenge at Arsenal: Let's go out and savor the experience!

"After our impressive 5-2 victory over Reading on Saturday, it's something that brings joy to all of us," stated the Wanderers' manager.

“We can go there with the pressure off and just know this is as tough as it gets and go there humble enough to know that there is zero expectation and no-one thinks we've got a cat in hell’s chance.

“But what we can do is go and learn about what it takes to be either a manager or a player at that level. We will go there and give it our best shot and see where that takes us. We are going to do our best to be competitive and hopefully we can make it an enjoyable experience, not just for us but for our supporters who are going down in their numbers again.

“The only way they will enjoy it is if we give them a game and we are capable of doing that, I have no doubt about that. Are we capable of winning? Probably not, but we are capable of being competitive and showing flashes and glimpses of what we are and who we are as a team right now. We’re looking forward to it and hopefully the players can go there and execute a good performance.”

Evatt also told Wanderers TV: “We've won two cup games to enable us to have this opportunity to go to Arsenal and give everyone a great night and a great experience and for the club to make and have some significant finance off the back of it. We have had to earn the right to do that, which we've done, and now it's down to us to go and enjoy it and show them what we can do.

“We want to go there and be effective, be aggressive, be intense and play the way that we play. We need to maybe tweak one or two things but take it to them and be the best version of ourselves and see how far that takes us.

“Everybody will want to play, I have no doubt about that. But we know what's more important. Again, that's no disrespect to the competition or Arsenal but Crawley on Saturday is a more important game for us.

“There will be some rotation. We need energy. We are at our best when we play with energy and we saw that, in particular in the first half on Saturday, that we're hard to stop when we play with that energy intensity and aggression.”