Penalty misery again struck Dartford as they crashed out of the play-offs against St. Albans City. After the game, Darts manager, Alan Dowson, gave his thoughts.

“You can’t miss that many chances, to be honest.” he said. “The game plan, brilliant, performance wise, no problem. We gave a goal away from a corner that was two foot off the ground, so that was massively disappointing.

“Second half again, chances, chances but we’re not finishing chances and we’re not winning these games. It’s devastating, so it’s good old Dartford again, to stay where we are again, that’s what we do. That’s what happens.”

Although disappointed with the goal conceded and missed chances in the play-off game, Dowson had no grounds for complaints with his team over the course of the season.

He said: “They’ve been great with what they’ve achieved this year. It’ll be a lot tougher next year. Can we get in the top seven again? I don’t know. I’ll go away for the next couple of days and think about that because the league will be stronger. We haven’t got the budget over teams, as you know.

“We’ve achieved massively. We’re not a big club. I don’t know where it comes from. We get watched by 900 hundred people and we’re about mid-table in the budgets and the lads have done very well, dug in. We’ve just got to make this a big club, to be honest.”

Preparations for next season start immediately. Dowson continued: “We’ve got to sit down and see what the budget is, and things like that, and see if I can do it with the budget again because I thought that with the budget I had this year I could get them in the top seven, I didn’t dream of getting in the top two.

“Can we do it next year? We do it every year, we get to the play-offs and fail so I haven’t done much better than the last guy, to be honest.”

There will be more full time teams in the league for the 2023-24 season and the Dartford manager knows that players will leave for other clubs.

He said: “It’s going to be much tougher next year. We always lose players to Welling. We always lose players to Maidstone, and things like that. Unless something happens, I can’t see anything changing so I think we’ve got to start looking at ourselves as a club and see where we want to go.

“I’m proud of the players and what people’s done but at the end of the day it’s disappointing isn’t it.”

He confirmed that he will take a break in the summer, but he won’t be switching off completely.

“I’ll probably go on holiday but my phone will be with us. We’ve got to get on with it. That’s all we can do. The first game is on the first of July and somewhere along the line we’ve got to bring some players in somehow, and work the budget.”

Pictures supplied by Keith Gillard.