Andy Hessenthaler’s Dover Athletic face one of their longest trips of the season to Hartlepool United following a week that the Whites boss would sooner forget as his side dropped points against lowly Chorley seven days ago before the sudden midweek departure of striker Alfie Pavey to Barnet.

Speaking to KSN, Hessenthaler reflected firstly on another frustrating afternoon at Crabble. He said, “Disappointed as we were at home. Bit frustrated with the game really as we just seem to have lost our way a little bit in terms of tempo, belief and confidence at home – I don’t know why – but we’ve just lost our way and we know we have to get that back especially at home.”

“We didn’t lose the game, but it was a game that we’d pencilled in that we should have got three points from.”

Pavey’s departure, Hessenthaler admitted, came as a surprise. The Dover boss told us, “Our chairman got a call from the Barnet chairman and they spoke and showed an interest and made an offer. The Chairman spoke to me and I spoke to Alfie – it happened quite quickly in the end really.”

“The deal is good for everyone – Barnet are a bigger club than us. At this present time, they’ve been in the Football League and are full time football club – we are now, but just for the last eleven or twelve months since we turned it around to go full time.”

“Alfie was interested and he went to talk to them and as I said, the deal worked out to be good for both parties. I had a chat with him and told him that I’ll be looking for something slightly different to what we’ve already got, and the deal happened.”

“He goes with our best wishes as he was a big part in us staying up last season – he’s done great for us.”

“We’re not going to rush into finding a replacement – I’ve been making a few calls and we’ve been looking and talking about different players to get something that we haven’t got to help us.”

“We’ve already got Inih (Effiong) who’s the second leading scorer in the League – he gets some unfair criticism to be fair and we’re disappointed with some of those who criticise, especially when he is the second leading scorer and probably could have had a few more – forwards are going to do that!”

“He’s done great and we’ve also got Stephen Rigg who we signed from Gateshead – but to be fair to him, we’ve played him as a wide player – we’ve got him as a striker and got that option. When we’ve played away from home, we’ve played him in a slightly different type of shape with him playing wider.”

“But as I say, we probably need something different to those two and we’ll get our thinking caps on, make some calls and see what we can do over the next couple of weeks.”

“We are still a relatively small club in this League as there are now ten ex-Football League clubs in the division. We’re not getting the “little old Dover” tag so much anymore for what we did last year and the way we started this year. We want to keep players – we don’t want to sell – but after all every player has his price!”

“I think we could have a lot more points and that the frustrating thing for me. The thing about us is that we’ve started off OK and we could be a lot better. But you have to look at it and be realistic about it and look at some of the teams below us, there are some massive clubs – Wrexham, Chesterfield, Notts County, and the two from last year who challenged Solihull and Fylde and the Barnet’s and Dagenham’s – so we’re doing OK but we won’t get carried away – we won’t get too down when we lose games, but we wont get carried away when we go on a decent run like we did last year!”

“It’s another ex-League club at the end of a very long trip, but at least it’s not in the middle of winter! We’re four wins out of five, so hopefully we can continue our good form, but we know it won’t be an easy game. It’s another real test for us – we’ll travel with confidence and hopefully we can get a win.”

Kevin Loko is a doubt with an ankle injury but Dover welcome back Kurtis Cumberbatch after suspension. Ricky Modeste missed training this week though Hessenthaler hopes that both he and Bobby Joe Taylor will be available.