FORMER Wanderers winger Fil Morais has urged the current crop to embrace the pressure of playing for such an historic club.

Morais, affectionately known as 'The Postman', feels the level of expectation around being at a club that had previously graced the Premier League and Europe made him a better player.

And he is sure that if a similar attitude was mirrored by Ian Evatt's men they would soon start to climb the league.

Evatt has talked about the pressure of being at a high profile club in the lower leagues, where the expectation is on them to be at the top of the table.

The reality is very different, with Bolton currently struggling near the bottom of League Two with only two wins from 11 games this season.

But Morais feels that if Evatt's players relish that responsibility rather than fear it, they will thrive - just like he did.

“I went to Bolton and I felt like I’d been there for years," explained the former Chelsea youngster, who followed Phil Parkinson from Bradford City to Wanderers, signing in February 2017.

“The group was amazing, lots of good players who had played at a higher level. I loved the pressure around the club. For me it was the perfect club, it’s always what I’d been looking for - a club where the fans expect more.

“Even if you get a good result it’s like ‘okay we’ve won but we could have done this better’, or ‘he’s not Djorkaeff, he’s not Anelka’, and I liked that about Bolton because it made me feel like I was playing for something bigger than just me.

“(It was) similar to Bradford in terms of the fanbase. Because of the fire tragedy at Bradford you always felt like you were playing for something bigger, for the people and it represented so much more, and with Bolton it was the prestige of the club and where it had been and the players that had been there. It’s like ‘Wow, I need to turn up here, I need to go to the next level’.

"That’s what I felt going to Bolton and it got the best out of me, alongside Phil’s great management in terms of how he deals with me."

But even when Wanderers were doing well when Morais signed, pushing for promotion back to the Championship, he remembers it was not always plain sailing with the fans. But rather than buckle under criticism, he says it inspired him.

Speaking to Bolton News podcast The Buff Extra, the 34-year-old explained: “We were doing well, we were winning, we were drawing now and again, and when we’d draw we used to have so much criticism at Bolton and I couldn’t believe it but I loved it because it made me strive for even better.

"A draw is not good enough, it’s just not good enough and it was just the perfect club for me to align with because I thought the same way so it was literally a match made in heaven. With that, with the manager and the way he brought in players that had that character to deal with that, that’s why we were successful, because we had a group of men who understood the pressures and weren’t affected by outside influences.

“In this day and age with social media and everything you can easily feel how the fans are feeling or any of their frustrations so you’ve got to really have a thick skin and extremist mentality I call it, like a drive that is relentless and appreciate and adapt or accept what your club is about, accept that your fans want more and it’s an amazing pressure to have, it’s an amazing pressure to embrace and it got the best out of me."

Morias ended the season with 13 assists - the fourth most in League One that season despite only signing halfway through the season - and two goals, helping Bolton to a second-placed finish, which was enough to see them get an instant return to the Championship.

But even when results did not go their way in the final month of the season, picking up only one point from games against Scunthorpe, Oldham and Bury, Morais said his belief never wavered.

“Nothing ever entered my mind other than ‘we’re getting promoted’," he said.

"Even the Port Vale game where we thought we’d done it and we hadn’t, I remember the deflation within the changing room and a few of the players you could see were visibly (thinking) ‘oh dear, we’re going to the last game.

"For me, even when I went to Bolton, I looked at the league and I thought even if we go to the last game just look at what we’ve got and our form as we went along. We have great assets, great players who can turn it on in games. We always seemed to produce when it really mattered. So I thought regardless of what matters we’re getting automatic promotion."

He added: “Mindset is massive especially when you’re at big clubs. Having been at smaller clubs and bigger clubs you do see the differences in players that are in there why certain clubs stay where they are and certain clubs go up, or certain players do well or certain players don’t.

“It’s very easy to go with the flow of what the man next to you is doing and it sometimes it just takes one or two to change people’s thinking, someone brave enough to change the mindset of the group and put themselves out there."

The Buff is available on Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud and The Bolton News website.