Unbeaten in their last four matches on the road, with just one goal conceded, the Whites have worked on an issue which threatened to be the undoing of their promotion ambitions in League One.
Schumacher takes his side to Reading tonight looking for a fifth away win of the campaign, and potentially an opportunity to close the gap on second-placed Lincoln City.
The head coach cannot point to a singular factor that has changed in his side’s approach games away from home, other than the fact they have sharpened up in front of goal.
“We have changed tactically for a couple of the games,” he said. “The Wigan game and the Stevenage game, we defended slightly differently because of the way they were set up. But I don’t think anything’s changed with our mentality or how we prepared. I think we’ve just been a little bit more clinical.
“Like we were against Wimbledon, we scored early in that game and then probably should have scored again to kill the game off.
“And then we have had to show different sides of us where we had to dig in and get through a difficult period, and then show some quality to get back into the game, like we did at Lincoln on Saturday.
“Nothing has changed exactly – I just think the results have picked up. I don’t think we’ve played any differently. We’ve just managed to get the results that we needed.”
Tonight it is back to where it all started at Bolton for Schumacher, who took charge of his first match at the Select Car Leasing Stadium a little over a year ago.
He had been appointed just 24 hours earlier and admitted at the time that even learning all the players’ names had been a challenge by the time kick-off arrived.
“We only had, say, 24 hours, and I think one training session with the lads on the Friday,” Schumacher recalled. “I got asked if I wanted to be on the touchline or sit in the stand and watch the game, because Andy (Taylor) and Julian (Darby) had done well in the previous two games. But I just said, let’s get on with it.
“I remember the game, I thought we played really well. We had some big chances, I remember Aaron Collins going through one-on-one a couple of times. We had some really big opportunities that we didn’t manage to take.
“When the game looked as though it was going to peter out and be a nil-nil, we gave a mad penalty away from that handball, which came out of nowhere. We ended up losing the game, which was disappointing, but it showed me from the players that we had some good players in the squad and a few decent performances that night but didn’t get the result that we wanted.
“This time I hope hope we can go better than that.”