“If we’d have not done that and played just one up top to shore things up and look to take Bolton back for a replay, then yes, things might have been different.

“But the manager wasn’t making us more negative. If anything, he was giving us more of a physical presence up front.”

Heitinga has seen his first-team opportunities limited this season by the defensive partnership of Jagielka and Sylvain Distin, but the former hopes the Dutchman can take confidence from only the fourth goal of his Goodison career.

“We are a tight unit, but the manager can only play two centre-backs at one time,” said Jagielka.

“You do feel sorry for people, but Johnny understands that’s what happens. He has shown a good attitude and is a good guy, and everybody is really happy for him to have got the goal.

“He’ll get the credit and some of the headlines and I hope that will give him a boost going into the rest of the season.”

Everton suffered a blow when Kevin Mirallas’ first start in seven weeks ended with the Belgian hobbling off on 17 minutes having aggravated his hamstring injury

Moyes, though, is confident the damage is nothing serious, and Jagielka added: “We started off quite well but had to jiggle things around when Kevin went off and lost our momentum a bit.

“We’ve been struggling a bit with confidence regards our forward play, so we knew it would be a tight second half.

“We are not particularly ecstatic with our performance. But in the Cup, everybody knows it’s about getting through to the next round.

“We’ve shown we are taking the FA Cup seriously this season. A lot of teams have decided to make wholesale changes, but we don’t have a massive squad. We couldn’t make 10 changes and have 10 pairs of fresh legs for midweek.

“We want to go on a decent run in the FA Cup.”