Woeful Welling United slumped out of the F.A. Cup without registering a shot on target against lower league club Harrow Borough. After the game, manager Steve Lovell expressed his displeasure with his players.

“The opposition deserved to win.” he said “We were terrible today and there’s no excuses. 

“We work during the week on the training field. We try and get them to play a certain way but once they cross that line it’s down to them and they let us down, they let everyone down today. They let me and Tristan (Lewis) and the staff down. They let Mark (Goldberg) down and they let the supporters down. And they’ve let themselves down.” 

He continued “You’re missing your two normal centre halves but we should still have enough to put on a good performance and beat these boys, but we didn’t. I don’t know where it’s come from. The last four games, two in the league and two in cup games, we played quite well and got results but today was no excuses. We were poor and they deserved to win.

“When there’s balls going in the box and you haven’t got anybody on the end of them, we’ve got forwards here that are supposed to be goalscorers and they’re not in the box so what are you supposed to do? You can only work with players and try and make them better but perhaps they’re not up to what we’re asking them to do.”

Next Saturday Welling entertain Vanarama National League South leaders Dartford and Lovell knows that another performance like this could result in a heavy defeat so he has a lot of work to do during the week. He said “We’ll go training this week and try and build up for Dartford next week which will be a very tough game but in football things change and it’s up to me to make things right ready for next week so that when we come here we put on a better performance and give Dartford a good game.

“You can pick a team and you can work on things and get things organised off the field for when you come on the field but you can’t legislate for people not showing that desire to want to win games and there were four or five out there who really wanted to do it but the rest of them…”

After the game, Lovell kept the players out on the pitch for a post match debrief. “I just said to them ‘anybody can be dropped from that team next week.’” he explained “I’ve got to see who trains best this week and put them out there because there’s certain players who we’ve been relying on, hoping that they produce performances, and they haven’t. They’re either not good enough or they just don’t want to. 

“I can’t take that much longer, I haven’t got time. We’re out of the FA cup so it’s the league now and with a big game next Saturday, it’s a massive one so we look forward to that one, we’ll work towards it and hopefully we’ll have a better performance.”

Despite their awful showing, Lovell remains positive and he said “Next week. we’ll be the underdogs. We’ve shown in the last few games that we can put on a performance to win games but it’s all about attitude and the will to want to do it and the boys didn’t show that today. That’s one thing that I said to the supporters when we had the meeting at the start of the season one thing that I will always demand is effort. 

“There’s players today that didn’t show the effort so they won’t be involved next week. It’s as simple as that. If there’s players on the bench who I feel that perhaps deserve to go and have a chance because of their efforts, then they deserve to go out there and that’s what I’ll do next week.

“I’ve always said that it was going to be a difficult period, difficult year this year and it’s proving to be that. I feel that we’ve got enough here for us to work with but today it’s a setback. It’s a massive setback and it’s something that I’ve got to look at and see how we can put that right for next week.”

Picture supplied by Dave Budden.