By james art The defender was part of the Blues set-up for a decade, graduating from the academy to make his first-team debut in 2016.
His five Championship seasons at St Andrews yielded just 30 appearances, but the 28-year-old insists he is not returning to the Midlands with a point to prove.
Birmingham’s massive summer spending following their relegation guaranteed them favorites for the title and they have made an excellent start, winning eight of their first 10 league games.
Although his former club grabbed the headlines with their transfer business, Dacres-Cogley says his focus has been on improving Bolton’s fortunes over the past few weeks.
“To be honest, I tried not to pay too much attention to the table at all,” he told The Bolton News. “For me it’s about the next three points.
“A lot of people talk about them (Birmingham), they win games and stuff, but it’s nothing to do with us. While we take points, they can do whatever they want.
“I want to beat them. Anyone would if they had left a club after being there for so long.
“I haven’t tried to focus on anything other than what’s ahead of me. We want to be top of the table, they are there at the moment and they are the target, so we want to catch them. The only way we can do that is by winning games.”
Ian Evatt will serve the second of his three touchline penalties this evening and will once again be in radio contact with his assistants Stephen Craney and Pete Atherton from a position in the stands.
Dacres-Cogley says the impact is minimal – but he believes decision-making on the pitch has improved over the past few months.
“To be honest, a lot of the guys don’t really hear it,” he said of the manager’s instructions. “We try to share different pieces of information with each other anyway, we know the solutions, we know what the teams are trying to do to us. If there’s a certain press, we have to change the way we build, things like that.
“We have to deal with it on the pitch and then at half-time you talk to the staff and say ‘they’re doing this, that, blah, blah, blah, but it’s got to be decided between us, really. You can’t expect everything to come from the side.
“I think we have enough experience. I think before we were probably guilty of not having that communication on the field to change the game, we were playing into their hands a little bit. I think we’re better at it now and you’re hearing more from guys trying to figure out different ways to manipulate teams and play the way we want to play.
“It’s getting better – and we’ve definitely got to get better, everything does, but we’re on the road with it now.”
Wanderers have won four of their last five games since a humiliating 4-0 defeat at home to fellow relegation side Huddersfield Town last month. And Dacres-Cogley believes the shock of that result ultimately brought out the best in the players around him.
“You can see there’s an improvement and sometimes it takes something like that to fire up the team,” he said. “From the disappointment, everyone felt we knew something had to change and hopefully we’ve shown in recent weeks that it has, so we’ve got to get on with that now.”