Bolton manager Gary Megson believes it is time for his former Aston Villa players to deliver on their return to the club this weekend.

Zat Knight and Gary Cahill will make up the centre-half pairing for Bolton as they take on Villa in Saturday's Premier League game at Villa Park.

Both players were recruited by Megson from Villa, with Cahill having already gone back to play with his new club there twice over the last two seasons.

On both those occasions it proved a humiliating experience, with Villa winning the fixture 4-0 and 4-2, and Megson hopes that Cahill - and now Knight, who was also shown the door by Martin O'Neill - will feel they have a point to prove on Saturday.

"I'm sure they will feel like that - being ex-Villa players they will want to go and put a show on," Megson said.

"In the past we've had ex-Villa players like Gavin McCann, Jlloyd Samuel and Gary Cahill who to be perfectly honest, have never done themselves justice when they have gone back to Villa Park.

"It will be nice if we can go there and the two lads perform in a way that I know they can."

Samuel will be unable to make his return to Villa as part of the Bolton squad following his sending-off against Chelsea at Reebok Stadium last weekend.

The incident, in which he brought down Didier Drogba a minute before half-time to give away a penalty, led to the first goal for the Blues in a 4-0 win.

It was Chelsea's second 4-0 victory over Bolton in four days after their similar triumph in the Carling Cup, but Megson insists that his players have been left far from deflated.

Asked if he thought their confidence had been knocked, Megson said: "Not at all - in fact, I would say it has even gone up.

"With 11 against 11, Chelsea didn't score against us and we gave not far off as good as we got.

"I accept that their quality was better than ours but they knew that they had been in a game for 45 minutes.

"If Jlloyd hadn't been sent off, I'm sure it would have been different, and I didn't feel it should have been 4-0 - the fourth one was offside.

"If we had had our full complement on and we had got into the second half and started the way we did with 10 men, we might have got a better result. I think we did ourselves proud."

The heavy losses to Chelsea have brought Bolton back down to earth after a run of form that saw them suffer only one defeat in seven matches.

That sequence included a 2-2 draw with Tottenham, a 3-2 win over Everton and a 2-1 defeat at Manchester United from which they were unlucky not to emerge with a point, and Megson believes things are still on the up despite the blip over the past few days.

"The players were clapped off the pitch at half-time and at full-time (against Chelsea in the league)," Megson said.

"They got a great deal of plaudits at Manchester United, beat Everton for the first time in a long time and put in a fantastic performance against Tottenham, just getting caught at a set-piece.

"Everything is going brilliantly.

"It's just one of the issues that you get in the Premier League, and it's why everyone wants to watch it - you're not just playing against the best teams in your country or Europe, but the best teams in the world.

"It's not just me who has been positive. The media, the supporters, they know what's going on, they have seen it."

With regard to matters off the pitch, Megson admitted that the news that the club's parent company had made a loss over the last financial year was concerning.

"You don't want to see your company losing money. I don't get involved with it at all, but if the club is losing money, then it's not a nice thing to see," he said.

Asked whether he had spoken to the chairman about the implications for the club's transfer budget, Megson said: "No, because everyone is trying to achieve the same things at the football club - we want the results on the pitch and we would like the results off the pitch to go hand in hand with that.

"I know that the training ground is a lot cheaper to run than it ever has been, and I know how much there is in terms of transfers coming in and transfers going out and how much we've spent.

"I don't know the whole gamut of what goes on at Bolton and it's not my job to know.

"But I do know that on the football side of it, we have taken a side from the bottom of the table to mid-table and not spent a huge amount of money."