ANDY Drury reckons Eastleigh will have to buck their ideas up to stand any chance of springing an FA Cup third round replay upset at Bolton Wanderers tomorrow (8pm).

The 32-year-old former Stevenage, Ipswich and Luton midfield maestro is one of the more quietly spoken members of the Spitfires squad, but he clearly doesn’t like losing.

That much was evident as he emerged stony-faced from the dressing room on Saturday after the Spitfires had limply exited the FA Trophy 2-1 against National League rivals Gateshead.

Leading by a James Constable goal at half-time, Eastleigh were outclassed by the Tynesiders after the break and looked a shadow of the side that had been three minutes, plus added time, away from turfing Championship strugglers Bolton out of the Cup at the first time of asking.

In fact if it hadn’t been for the bog-like pitch which allowed Wanderers’ defender David Wheater to rescue his side with a scrambled goalline clearance, Drury would have put the Spitfires 2-0 in the clear before Darren Pratley salvaged the visitors a 1-1 draw.

With Bolton labouring under a mountain of problems on and off the pitch, there will never be a better opportunity for Eastleigh – non-League’s sole FA Cup survivors – to get through to the fourth round where a plum home tie with Leeds United awaits.

But Sittingbourne-based Drury, who worked his way through the non-League ranks before getting his Football League break at the age of 27, reckons the Spitfires will have to play an awful lot better than they did on Saturday to exploit Bolton’s fragile confidence.

Drury, a 2008/09 Trophy winner with Stevenage, said: “Obviously we wanted to do well in the competition, but it was flat today and we were poor. We should have been professional enough to put in a performance.

“Hopefully it was a one-off, but it’s still disappointing. I’ve won the Trophy before and it would have been nice to win it again.

“It can be difficult after a big game like Bolton, but we’d had a week to recover and prepare.

“I felt we were disjointed at times and we were pulled apart a bit too easily. I’m a bad loser and can get a bit angry after games like that.

“There were words said in there (the dressing room) and we got told it wasn’t good enough.”

Drury, though, is confident Eastleigh will have learned from Saturday’s mistakes and will be a different proposition tomorrow against a Bolton side carrying the weight of the entire Sky Bet Championship on their troubled shoulders.

“I’ve played at Bolton before when I was at Ipswich, I think we won 2-1,” he recalled.

“It’s a decent ground and we’ve got to go up there and take the game to them.

“They’re obviously low on confidence and we need to get at them from the first whistle.

“People are all talking about what’s going on up there which must make it hard for them to be fully concentrated on the game.

"To be fair I was disappointed we didn't beat them last week, conceding so late. But it was nice to play here in front of 5,000 people."