Substitutes Anthony Cook and Moses Emmanuel helped Welling United record a ‘come from behind’ F.A. Trophy victory over St Albans City.

Although the game didn’t go entirely as planned, it’s the Wings who are in the hat for the first round draw. Goldberg enthused “(I’m) delighted to get the win. Today we said it doesn’t matter how scrappy it was. You can’t look at last week’s performance and expect, with the amount of changes we were forced to make, to be more of the same, unfortunately, but I didn’t expect it to be as scrappy and as poor a performance in the first half.

“I very rarely need to let my emotions get the better of me at half time but I did today. We knew we had to make some changes and fortunately the changes worked and the second half was as good a performance as we expected.”

One week earlier, Korrey Henry scored four times but was unavailable for the game against St Albans as Goldberg explained “He wasn’t allowed to play today in the Trophy. He goes back next week anyhow. Depending on what players they have available, it may reinvent itself in the future but at this moment in time he’s gone back to Bromley. We served the purpose for Bromley and in all honesty, he served the purpose for us.”

At the start, Bradley Goldberg was playing up front with Theo Widdrington playing just behind him but St Albans were not unduly troubled at the back so Welling switched players around to try to change things. Goldberg said “I could see from early on that it was an impossible task for Brad on his own up there.

“We made a slight change during the game when I put Danny Waldren up there with him. It was an improvement but in the second half, I knew I had to make wholesale changes. It was more about game understanding and we needed some experience and game intelligence up there with Brad.

“We scored the goal from a set piece, which was nice, then the second goal was an excellently worked goal between Brad and Cookie (Cook) and Moses so that’s just exactly what we needed.”

Speaking further about bringing Cook and debutant Emmanuel on, Goldberg said “I would like to have rested them both because they are both suffering slightly with different injuries but the great news is that they came on, they scored, they made a difference and we haven’t made their injuries any worse.”

Rob Swaine went off early in the second half and Goldberg did not know the extent of the injury. “I hope it wasn’t anything too serious” he said “Ejiro (Okosieme) wasn’t really fit but he did a great job and we’ve not made it (his injury) worse which is really good news.”

After Welling had gone ahead, they were hampered by the dismissal of Waldren and Goldberg wasn’t happy. “It was a fifty fifty challenge if I’ve ever seen one.” he said. “I’ve told the referee that he’s going to have to look at it and can he please phone me and let me know if he got it right. The studs weren’t up. He went in and if he hadn’t gone in as hard as he went in, Danny would have been hurt.

“We had to then sit back and defend and I thought we did it extremely well. We went back to two banks of four. We had to do that at Weymouth and we did that really well until they scored in the last minute and we used that as a bit of a reference point. Unfortunately it’s had to happen to us a number of times since. We can’t be giving away red cards but I don’t think that that red card today was fair.”

Goldberg admitted that he would have settled for a draw when one down at the break. “I would have taken a replay at half time.” he said. “Right now I’m just delighted that we’ve won. I wouldn’t have wanted to have to go there on a Tuesday night but the reality is that it’s great that we have come back and won. We haven’t come back from one-nil down in the recent past so this should be a marker for us that we can do that.”

Picture supplied by Dave Budden.