A late Ronnie Vint goal proved decisive as Dartford avenged their Boxing Day defeat by beating Welling United on New Year’s Day.
Joint manager Adam Flanagan was far more satisfied with Dartford’s performance and said “We competed a lot better than we did previously. I thought that on the day we probably deserved the goal because we’d put a lot of good balls in. They’re keeper made a great save in the first half from a good header from Tom Bonner.”
Before the game started, Dartford were tenth and Welling were fourth but victory for the Darts put the two teams on level points. Flanagan said “To be fair, the league’s frightening. I thought that it was quite tight last year but there are ten teams that if results don’t go their way, can drop a significant number of places.
He feels that his team are on the up and confirmed “There’s more to come from this group, and we as a management team need to bring that out. We need to be scoring more goals and that comes from creating more chances and that’s what we’re working on. We’re not here entirely happy saying that we’ve been brilliant and this is the best we can do. We feel there’s more to come, and that’s what we’ve got to show in the second half of the season.”
Flanagan went on to explain how he and Jamie Coyle were taking a slightly different approach to his predecessor Tony Burman. “It’s difficult in the sense that it’s changing a philosophy because Tone would predominantly contract most of his squad so fans didn’t see a lot of rotation of players, and being truthful fans like to get to know their players and know that they are there for a season so that’s been something different and not something that they’ve been familiar with.
“But the way Jamie and I look at it, we want to have the flexibility in the squad to improve it as players come along and we feel that as the season has gone along we’ve brought better players to the team, players that we wouldn’t have been able to get in during the summer and we’ll continue doing that until we’ve got the balance right and our performances on the pitch match where we’d like our expectations to be.”
Explaining the clubs’ ambitions he continued “Our expectations is to have a better second half of the season, keep ourselves defensively tight, and offer more going forward with regards to a goal return because that’s an area we need to improve on. We’d like to get on the ball a little bit more and get it on the floor and try and play but we don’t want to lose what’s worked for us. It will be a progression.
“We want to stay competitive. We want to stay in the mix. We’ve got some big teams coming up and every game, if you don’t apply yourselves this year, you’ve got a good chance of losing whoever you play and if you have two or three losses you can be down in fourteenth or fifteenth place.
“It’s a very competitive league. I think Woking and Torquay are full time and that’s the first time that I’m aware of that there have been teams in this division that have gone full time. Billericay have gone to morning training as well. Then you’ve got other clubs who maybe have more finance than they’ve had in previous years. You’ve got clubs that you’d expect to be up there who maybe aren’t up there so it’s a really competitive division.”
Images courtesy of Dave Budden