After two defeats, Welling United visit St. Albans City looking for their first points of the season.

Their start to the season hasn’t been great with a three-nil defeat at Havant and Waterlooville followed by a four-one defeat at home to Hungerford Town. However, manager Steve Lovell has looked to try and cut out the basic defensive errors with three new signings including centre-back Dylan Pepe.  

Lovell is keen that his young talented team plays attractive entertaining football, and there were times in both games where the Wings were pleasing on the eye but their struggles at the back have made each match an uphill struggle.

On Tuesday, his newly built team played a full scale ninety minutes training match which was ideal for them to spend more time to gel whilst improving their fitness. That allowed them a Thursday night session preparing purely for the weekend.

St. Albans were given as tough a first two opening fixtures as they could have had. It’s widely believed that anyone who finishes higher than Dartford and Dorking Wanderers will win the league. To play them both in the first games was very hard. They lost three-one at Dartford and three-two at home to Dorking so they are also looking to kick-start their season.

There was no game at Clarence Park last season so their most recent game there was in February 2020 when Brad Quinton was leading the team away from the danger zone.

Dipo Akinyemi was on good form that day scoring once in each half before Joe Iaciofano pulled one back. An amazing save from Dean Snedker stopped Akinyemi from going home with the match ball but Welling held on comfortably for the win.

Image courtesy of Dave Budden