August is a busy month in the Vanarama National Leagues with a sixth of the season’s fixtures being completed by the end.

Bank Holiday Monday is when the final fixtures are completed and Welling United’s last game in the month is a difficult one away to league leaders Concord Rangers.

They go into the match on the back of a home draw against Hemel Hempstead Town in which they missed a plethora of chances. Manager Steve King admitted as much stating “If it was a Boxing match it would have been stopped. How many chances did we miss? Six, seven, eight, nine ten chances? (It was) one way traffic.

“Their keeper’s pulled off two fantastic saves and the missed chances were horrendous. How we didn’t win that game of football, I’m speechless really.”

Welling went behind in the eighth minute through a wide free kick. “Jordan Parkes is a good player and scores great goals but that was a cross that went straight in to me, from where I was but let’s take that away. We went on and had chance after chance.

“We took probably our hardest chance (Brendan Kiernan’s equaliser). The one-on-ones that we had in the game, we have got to put these games to bed. I think that’s as well as we’ve played against a good side who will be in and around the play-offs this year. We had so many chances. I think that’s the most we’ve had in any game we’ve played.”

He continued “I think that you’d be upset if you weren’t creating chances which we are. We’ve been on top of every single team we’ve played and we’re not killing the teams off.“

In a previous comment, King had suggested that another striker could come in. He won’t sign a player for the sake of it though and said “Only if the right one becomes available. We’re not going to just sign anybody. We’ve been trying to do something and we’ve got the blessing and backing from Mark (Goldberg) but we need the right one. We’ve got two very very good forwards and we need a third one.”

Injuries have affected team selection and he said “We had to change things today as Jordan (Gibbons)’s out with a hamstring, Richard (Orlu)’s out with a quad, Yannis (Ambroisine) is out with a hamstring and they’re three weeks away, those players, We moved Craig from left back to right back and brought Charles in and I thought everybody played really really well today.”

Anthony Acheampong and Thierry Audel both required treatment before playing on Saturday but should be fit for the Concord game despite being only thirty six hours later so Welling may name an unchanged side although Gavin McCallum impressed when brought on and will be considered for a start.

Images courtesy of Dave Budden