Tonbridge Angels’ winless home record continued as Hemel Hempstead Town claimed all three points at Longmead with a late winner.

After the game, Tonbridge manager Steve McKimm held a long team meeting with his players before emerging from the changing room to share his thoughts.

“We seem to be getting good results against the so called higher teams and coming up short against other teams.” he said  “That’s no disrespect to anyone, it’s just the category that these teams have been put in. 

“Today, it (the performance) was indifferent. I’ve just seen the second goal and it was a catalogue of errors that could have been avoided which, at this moment in time, it’s costing us. It happened on Tuesday and it’s happened again today, and we’ve got to eradicate that from our game.”

McKimm did not want to commit himself on whether Hemel’s penalty for the equaliser was a correct decision saying “If you want to call me Arsene Wenger, I’m too far away from the penalty. Our players don’t believe it was a penalty but the ref’s given it and you’ve got to go by what the referee does. He’s not going to change his mind and the fella’s stepped up and taken it well. If it is or it isn’t, at the end of the day it’s one all and you’ve got to get on with the game.”

However, he was less happy with the decision to send Tom Beere off. “Tom’s slid in. The ref’s told us at half time as we came off that it’s for violent conduct. I’ve seen the video and I think that he’s late, yes, definitely, the ball had gone, but he slid in on the floor, he hasn’t gone in knee high as we’ve been told and in my eyes it’s a yellow card.”

Just before half time, Hemel also had a player dismissed and that changed the team talk. “We told them to be patient with the ball and we were.” he continued.  “We weren’t creating any chances but you can keep the ball you can look after the ball because eventually something has to give and somebody has to come out of their hole and that’s what we’re encouraging them to do.”

“Make sure that they are more confident in themselves and wait for that opportunity. Unfortunately, sometimes get a little bit impatient and we tend to rush a pass when we don’t need to. 

“For the first twenty minutes they sat everyone in their half but once you give anyone a bit of encouragement like we did on Tuesday, like we did today, then they get their tails up and all of a sudden they start to play on the front foot and that’s what they did when they scored their goal.

He added “We asked them to get down our right hand side, their left hand side, like we did in the first half and we did it forty minutes into the second half when Khale (Da Costa)’s gone in and collided with their keeper and then Splatty (Javaun Splatt)’s gone in and it’s a great tackle by their centre half but to only do that in the fortieth minute of the second half, you’re not going to get much joy. Crosses were coming in but we just lacked that quality and that’s whet let us down in the last five minutes or so.”

Both the Angels and the Tudors have good away records but neither have won at home. When asked whether the absence of fans at games has had an effect, McKimm said “It doesn’t help but we’ve got a great away following as well. The fans are the fans. When it’s going badly, ninety-nine percent of them are behind you but the odd percent or two will be against you and the last two games we would have had a lot of positives but a few negatives as well because we haven’t been good enough. 

“It’s as simple as that. I’m not going to hide away from it. We haven’t been good enough to get a result. Today I thought that it was a draw written all over it and the one major bit of quality in the second half undid us and it’s a good finish.”

As disappointed as he was with the defeat, McKimm was still happy with the progress made so far this term saying “Last year we struggled at home to begin with until Christmas and the New Year then we started winning a few games so I’m under no illusions of the big task we’ve got ahead of us this season. 

“It was like that at the start of the season and what I’m looking for is improvement on certain sectors. What fans will do or what people will do is run away with themselves and think they’ve had a good start, they can go and do x, y and z. That’s not me being a negative manager, it’s me being a realist manager understanding where this football club’s at, where this football club wants to get to, and what stepping stones we’re taking to get there. 

“We could be on more points. We could be on less points. We’re on ten points from nine games. We’re better than we were last year. Yes, disappointments in the games we’ve lost in terms of the home games but we’ve got more points than we did at this time last season and that was my aim and the players’ aim at he start of the season regardless of where you get the points and who you play against because no game’s easy in this league.”