It was a sobering afternoon for Welling United when they crashed six-nil at Ebbsfleet United. Wings’ manager Peter Taylor was full of admiration for the hosts but felt that his team should have done better.

“You can tell that they’re full time.” he said “They’ve got lots of options every time that they get the ball and they’re very, very difficult to play against. But saying all of that, we started very poorly. 

“They scored three goals, early doors, where their players are playing around in our penalty box and they shouldn’t have the time and the space to do that so that’s disappointing on our side. I am disappointed with lots of things that we did but very impressed with Ebbsfleet.”

He continued “We had a little bit of a talk after the game, and it was a very sensible talk, and I do think that in some of their bodies. it’s a little bit of fear early doors when they’re playing a top team in the division and it’s something that if they want a career in football, whether it be Conference South, League One, League Two or the Conference, they’ve got to get it out of their system. 

“If they’re good enough players, they’ve got to take every bit of their quality onto the pitch and some of the things that I know my players can do, (they) didn’t do and we didn’t run around enough, the basics, we didn’t close down enough so we allowed a team that’s a very good team, to look even better.

“There’s other managers at Welling, I’m sure, that’s crossed that white line and are very difficult to play against. We weren’t that in the first forty-five minutes. We were easy to play against and we didn’t have enough belief in our bellies to go and win the match and that’s disappointing. That’s not good enough and it’s something that we’ve got to get better at. All the players heads are nodding in the changing room that they agree with me so we move on but this can’t keep happening. It’s happened too many times this year since I’ve been here and before I got here, Welling let in early goals and it just gives you an almighty hurdle to jump over.”

Taylor was without his first choice striker, Dipo Akinyemi, and chose to go into the game without a recognised striker. He said “He’s (Akinyemi) a big target man and he’s a good target man but unfortunately, we’ve had a couple of injuries to our strikers where they haven’t been able to play ninety minutes and that’s where I’ve had to be a little bit careful with who starts and so on but we hope that he’s going to have a chance of being fit the following Saturday and we’ve got Daniel Carr who was sub today but he will play ninety minutes on Tuesday and hopefully that’s going to help our number nine situation.”

After starting with two banks of four, Taylor made two changes at the break and reverted to his favoured formation of three at the back. He confirmed that neither change was due to injury and continued “I was disappointed with a couple of things and I wanted to change things around, not that I ever thought that we had a chance of winning the game six-five, being honest.

“I personally don’t think that it was the system, second half, was the reason we only lost one-nil. I think that when you’re five-nil down at half time, Ebbsfleet will starting to think probably fifty percent second half and probably fifty percent Tuesday night (when they host Maidstone United). I don’t think, personally, that a change of system is the reason that we got a bit better second half. Did we get better or did they switch off a touch?

On Tuesday night, Welling visit Dulwich Hamlet in the London Senior Cup, a competition that is low down in Welling’s priority list. Taylor said “I wasn’t going to (play a strong starting line up) but because of today, I’m not sure now. The most important thing for me is Welling staying in the league. I’ve never thought of the London Senior Cup as my most important game so I won’t be changing my mind on that but I’m going to try and get something out of the game in respect of seeing players playing minutes that could maybe then be in the team for Hungerford.”

Stefan Ilic came on as a substitute for Welling for the last twenty minutes to put his case forward as a possible starter in next week’s F.A. Trophy game at Hungerford. “That’s why I put on Stefan.” he said. “Stefan’s been training with us and working extremely hard. I could have put on Danny Carr but Danny probably needs ninety minutes now on Tuesday and that’s perfect for him.”

Picture supplied by Dave Budden.