IT has been impossible to read Bolton Wanderers on the pitch this season, and so it goes with their business in the transfer market this month.

Having forked out a hefty £1.2million to bring in Joel Randall from Peterborough United, the club shocked many supporters by accepting an offer from Huddersfield Town for Dion Charles reported worth three quarters of that amount.

There is no sign of an immediate replacement, and continued rumours of a fall-out between the manager and his top scorer for the last two seasons have evoked echoes of previous high-profile departures like Antoni Sarcevic and Dapo Afolayan.

With a fortnight remaining in the winter window the plan to kickstart a monumentally confusing and inconsistent campaign is no clearer, the mood around the club no brighter as a result.

Ian Evatt’s popularity across the fanbase has taken a devastating hit in the last few months and for him to mount a recovery from this far back would fly in the face of regular football logic, even if he remains defiant that he is not beaten yet.

Wanderers return home this weekend after a gruelling hat-trick of away games but there is valid debate over the welcome they will receive. Even with a win at Exeter and another to take them to the quarter finals of the Vertu Trophy at Lincoln, the league table still makes for grim viewing and the public remain suitably nonplussed on the prospects of their team and manager’s prospects as things stand.

In any other month there may be an opportunity for the board to pause for reflection but the January window has forced them to make a quicker call. They have backed Evatt to this point but for decisions of such magnitude as the signing of Randall and the sale of Charles to be taking place whilst there appears to be such discontent on the terraces is a truly extraordinary thing indeed.

Though the squad taken to promotion by Phil Parkinson in 2016/17 had a much larger wage budget than Evatt’s current group, the cumulative transfer fees paid over the last few years do make this the costliest team Bolton have ever put out at this level – with Saturday’s 18 totalling circa £5-6million.

With that sort of spending in mind, Football Ventures may feel entitled to pick an acceptable price for an asset like Charles, who had cost them £320,000 from Accrington Stanley a few years ago.

Some of the profit they make from the sale will go back to his former club – around 10 per cent, in fact – but there is an argument that to make £400,000 on a player who will turn 30 this year and whose form has been patchy in the last 12 months is not bad business.

Sound financial logic is not an easy sell, however, particularly when many will point to investments made over the last couple of seasons which have proven poor value.

Evatt has repeatedly asked that he be judged at the end of the season, not halfway through, and given the unstable form his team has repeatedly shown he could be considered fortunate in the modern game to be in the position to be able to make that request so confidently.

Though the manager maintained on Tuesday night that there had been many “stakeholders” involved in the decision to sell Charles – including the player himself – it is difficult to see anyone other than him having the final say, particularly as he was keen to stress that he still planned to spend money this month.

Charles cannot have been pleased to have started so infrequently of late and his body language did not speak of a player enjoying his lot. But privately he had made it known that he did not want to leave Bolton, despite the so-called ‘magic numbers’ being circulated far and wide which would be required to sign him.

Evatt even threw in a curveball last week when he said he expected Charles to be a Bolton player beyond January. In truth, there had been loose interest from a handful of teams before that stage, and a lot of agent talk, but nothing amounting to a concrete offer until the start of this week.

We will only know in the fulness of time whether the fee received for the Northern Ireland international is “good money” and at least part of that judgement will be influenced by how Michael Duff’s Huddersfield Town fare this season. With Joe Taylor already on board this week, their striker options now look much healthier, albeit the respective size of the two forwards do not necessarily marry with the direct football often preferred by the Terriers.

Indeed, if Duff is preparing to mix-up his approach, then could this offer an opportunity for Evatt to do the same? Could Charles’s departure lead to the introduction of some physicality in the attacking positions, or a striker more comfortable with playing with his back to goal?

Finding a player who has scored 20 goals in his last two seasons will not be an easy task, and more likely, Evatt will fall back on his recruitment department and the expertise offered by Ludonautics to find a player whose numbers fit the equation.

At his best, Charles had also offered pace, a waspish desire to press and chase defenders, which created plenty of goals during his three years with the club. At present, none of the attacking options in Bolton’s squad have the same sort of qualities.

Some will debate that we have not seen peak Dion Charles for some time. Fitness issues at the start of last year certainly took the edge off his performances and the stats don’t lie – no other player in League One has missed more clear-cut opportunities this season, the latest being in what will be his last Bolton appearance at Rotherham.

His regular goals had made him the poster boy for the Evatt era. The number 10 who sold shirts and got the unwavering adulation of the supporters no matter what the circumstances. He was, for a younger generation of supporters, the main man.

Some are reading this transfer as a concession of automatic promotion ambition, some as the result of a fall out between player and manager, others are reserving judgement until the end of the window when all the relevant additions and subtractions can be taken into account.

Aaron Collins has provided the most regular source of goals overall, though it must be noted that Charles has still scored more in League One this season. Elsewhere the contributions from John McAtee and Victor Adeboyejo require improvement.

What was already the most pressurised transfer window in Evatt’s four-and-a-half year stay has now had the temperature turned higher.