Maidstone United joint caretaker bosses Tristan Lewis and Simon Walton face a former England manager this weekend as the Stones desperately look to pull themselves closer to escaping the relegation trap-door in the National League.
Peter Taylor and his Dagenham & Redbridge side – who this week have reinforced their ranks by signing Conor Wilkinson from Gillingham – arrive at the Gallagher on the back of arguably one of the Stones most frustrating home performances – the 4-2 midweek defeat to Maidenhead was a tough one to take for Walton as he explained to KSN after the game.
He admitted, “We cant get too disheartened – there’s not an “R” against our name yet but the League table doesn’t look anywhere near as good and it should do and what it would have done if we’d have applied ourselves as we have done in recent games. But that was poor Tuesday night and so disappointing!”
“We’ll take one game at a time is a cliché I know but it doesn’t get any easier after we play Dagenham on Saturday as we’ve got Leyton Orient the next week – its not even belief now its realisation about what has to be done now about how to win games as we’ve shown that we’re more than capable about what we have to do but the same things just creep back in and again its just so frustrating.”
“Going up against an ex England manager – who picked me for the under 21s a couple of times – so soon isn’t something that I imagined that I’d be doing any time soon. It’s going to be a tough game but we’ll prepare the same as we would for anyone else and we’ll be as professional as ever. But you can only do so much – you can’t go out onto the pitch and make people head and kick the ball when they are supposed to! They’re flying and have recruited very well recently – we just got to dig in…”
Tuesday’s defeat had clearly left Walton stunned – indeed he admitted, “we all looked shell shocked – I don’t think one person on that pitch could say that they put in a performance worthy of the name. I keep saying it but that is a performance as to why we are where we are – its not a case of us not being good enough; I believe that the players in the dressing room are good enough to get us out – we’ve proved that in games but we’ve got to be more consistent in games and do the right things that win football games. None of this fancy stuff and the stuff that comes with it to do the stuff you have to do to win football matches. You have to head; you have to tackle and smash the ball out of the ground when you you’ve got to smash it out of the ground. And absolute bottom line on Tuesday night was that we didn’t do that all which is why we got well beaten by Maidenhead…”
“There’s things that will be said and dealt with before Saturday as that wasn’t acceptable – we cant play like that; you can have one in a blue moon but at the minute we’re the opposite way around – we’ve got to pic everyone up again and the people we think are ready to play and the people who are physically and mentally ready will play – we’ve given them every opportunity to stake their claim but I cant accept that performance on Tuesday.”