Whilst there was nothing at stake for already relegated Welling United, they ended their tenure in the Vanarama National League South with a point at home to Salisbury. After the match, caretaker manager Brian Statham gave Mark Doig his thoughts.

“The last thing that we wanted to do was to get beaten on the last day of the season at home.” he said.

“We knew that for those that did make the effort to come out and see us, you don’t want to get beaten again. It was important that we put in some kind of a performance. I thought we did that at times. I thought we showed a bit more character than we may have in the past. We just needed a little bit more quality at times, and a little bit more composure on the ball. We didn’t show enough of that in the first half and I thought we did that in the second half.”

He continued “There is a lot of talent in that dressing room. The make up of the team has been skewed. It’s not been right but individually, there are some really talented footballers in there. When you see them at their best, and we haven’t seen that enough, there are some really good players. I’m disappointed that we haven’t been able to show that enough times this season.”

Visitors, Salisbury, weren’t guaranteed not to get relegated at the start of the game but news filtered through, quickly, that another result was going their way and they would be safe. Statham confirmed “They’ve scored a penalty, that was a penalty, but other than that I don’t think that they’ve really caused us any problems but all they wanted was to stay up and they didn’t really need to do much to achieve that today so for us today, it was an opportunity to get something out of it, and come out with something at the final whistle.”

Injuries haven’t helped Welling’s cause all season. On that point, the Welling caretaker manager added “For the last three weeks I think we’ve probably had six, maybe seven out injured. Dave (Winfield) came back today, which is great and we saw that improved that back line, but we still had seven out injured. We only had three (fit enough to participate) on the bench, so not a lot to choose from so if a defender got injured today, we would have had to shuffle the pack again.”

One late injury befell goalkeeper Rhys Lovett meaning that an emergency loan had to be agreed and organised. Nineteen year old Australian, Henry Blackledge, came in from Luton Town. Statham said “The goalkeeper had never met his backline before but I thought that he did really well. I really liked his performance today. He needs to get used to this level and this was a really good opportunity to do that and for us, we needed a goalkeeper so it works both ways.”

Now that the season has ended, Statham can work exclusively on his new role at the club. “The idea is, director of football, and a lot of work has gone on already as is always the case when you get to the latter part of the season.” he said.

“We’re now working on players, making sure that we get the right type of players in for the new manager, which will be announced, all things being equal, next week, and then we can look forward to building a really, really competitive team for next season in the Isthmian.

“We need to look at the players that we’ve got and I’ve made my recommendations already to the manager and it’s now for him to decide what of those, if any of those, in this squad that he keeps. If he does, then great, we add to it, and if not, it’s going to be an enormous rebuilding job.

“There’s a lot of work to do with the new manager and the players. He’s been in the situation whereby he’s still playing and still involved so he wanted to leave it until the end of the season before anything was announced.”