Park View Road hosted an unbelievable North Kent A2 thriller as Welling United and Ebbsfleet United shared seven goals with the Wings coming out on top.
Three days earlier, Ebbsfleet won at Havant and Waterlooville despite only having nine players on the pitch for the last thirty minutes and Fleet manager Dennis Kutrieb believes that it might have had an effect.
He said “If you score three goals away, then you need to win this game. My feeling was we lost too much energy on Saturday and you could see some boys today were a little bit flat when you normally see they have enough energy to bring a little bit more onto the pitch.
“That was missing today but like I said we scored three goals away, and that was a big effort from the boys, come back in the game, three-three, you can’t concede another goal and run again so that was too sloppy today, to concede four goals away.”
Kutrieb felt that had they ever had a lead, things might have been very different. He explained “We had two big chances in the first two minutes so we have to get the lead. When you start and get the lead perhaps the game will go on a little but in another direction. They have to come. You can manage the game and try to score the second goal but it was hard today because nearly every chance was a goal and sometimes it’s football.
“It’s hard to take for me, it’s hard to take for the boys but we can’t suffer too much because we have to go for another tough game on Saturday.”
Despite that, he was still prepared to give the opposition some praise “Credit to them.” he said. “They had problems after twenty minutes, they can’t run some of those boys but you can see they fought for every minute on the pitch, everywhere on the pitch.
“My boys did the same. I can’t say that they didn’t fight because it was a great fight for coming back after two goals down but when you concede these goals too easy, defending was not good enough today, then you can’t win a game away. It doesn’t matter if it’s Havant or if it’s Welling or who else in the league, you need to be prepared for every opponent and if you’re not focussed enough in defending, we had this earlier in the season and now we’ve improved and got a little better, but today it was back again.”
Now, he needs to concentrate on the next game against league leaders Dorking Wanderers. Kutrieb said “We need to recover quickly because Saturday is completely another game so they try to play football, they are full of confidence, and they won yesterday again and they will (want to) win on Saturday, that’s their plan and that’s our plan and that will be completely another game but we need to get a result so we will try to get the three points back which we lost today.”
Whether there will be players returning remains to be seen. Kutrieb said “We can’t say at the moment. We had little small injuries today so we picked another squad today because of the small injuries but we will head on to the next phase and we will see on Saturday, who’s ready to go.”