The Wanderers boss will plunge Jack Bonham in for his debut against fierce rivals Wigan Athletic tomorrow afternoon, just two days after the 32-year-old trained with his team-mates for the first time.

It follows a week where both the club’s first team keepers quit the club – Teddy Sharman-Lowe recalled by Chelsea, and Tyler Miller indicating that he was returning home to the US after his family struggled to settle.

Schumacher insists the move for Bonham was always on the cards after both Sharman-Lowe and Miller had struggled for consistency in the first half of the season.

But he maintains the timing of the deals – which also involved David Harrington being signed from Fleetwood Town on a two-and-a-half-year deal – was out of his hands.

Asked if it was a ‘gamble’ so close to key games at Wigan and Stevenage, he told The Bolton News: “There’s nothing we can do about it!

“Chelsea called Teddy back and we were going to bring Jack in anyway when Tyler was gone, so there’s nothing we can do about it now.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a gamble, that’s the situation.” 

Wanderers will use their fourth goalkeeper of the season at the Brick Community Stadium looking to arrest a worrying dip in form which has seen them win just once in their last seven games.

Schumacher felt his goalkeeping department needed improvement, although the timing of Miller’s departure has meant a much greater turnover than expected.

“It’s a bit unusual,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s unprecedented, but I’ve not seen it before. But as I say, we feel as though that department, we haven’t had the results from it that we wanted. 

“I think Teddy’s done a lot of good things for us in the first half of the season, but there were goals that went in that we feel as though shouldn’t have gone in.

“We made mistakes in the Exeter game and the Mansfield game that, again, can be avoided. Now, in any young goalkeeper’s career, that can happen. But I said to him the other day to learn from this experience, and he will have learned from it.

“It is part of his development if he’s had a little bit of a setback to be able to go again. And I’m sure he will. There’ll be people queuing up to take him.

“But here at this moment, where we are, under the pressure and the circumstances of what our fans bring, I think bringing in somebody with that calmer head and that experience is probably the right call. 

“The Tyler Miller one is something that we didn’t see coming. We gave him a contract in the summer and expected him to see it out and we’re even considering extending.

“But when he came to me and said, look, this opportunity has come up for him to go back to America and it’s something that he and his family really want to take. He’s a really good guy. He was 30-odd years of age.

“You don’t want to stand in his way and say no. And then six months later, we don’t give him a contract and that’s not there. I’m not that type of person.

“If he feels that we can still strengthen the department, which he feels that we have, then it was OK for him to move on.”