Dave Winfield’s goal helped Welling United claim a point at Chippenham Town that took them out of the bottom four of the Vanarama National League South leaving manager Rod Stringer pleased.

After the match, Welling United manager Rod Stringer gave his thoughts. “(It was a) really tough game.” he said. “We knew that anyway. They do amazingly here.” 

Another early goal conceded made Welling’s task more difficult. “Yet again, I’m disappointed.” he added. “I thought the goal was preventable from the corner but I felt really pleased about how we started getting into the game a little bit at one-nil down.”

“We showed some character there and it was a great finish by Davy. The free kick’s come in, it looked like it was slightly under hit but Davy’s movement has done really well going up the hill.”

“It puts us level pegging and then I thought, second half, if we used the hill like we do at our place at times, with that momentum and keep knocking on the door. But we didn’t really ask too many questions, second half.”

“I thought probably the draw was a fair result, but the one that sticks in my throat was a handball. It didn’t look like it was a possible handball. It was actually a hand to the ball and we could be sitting here now saying we got the penalty. We might not have scored it but we could have won the game.” 

Three players made their debuts, two as starters and one from the bench, and Stringer felt that they made a difference. “I certainly felt we were better today.” he confirmed. “We battled harder today. I think there have been other games we would have gone on and lost this although they did have a couple of good chances, second half.”

“I thought Scott Kashket showed us some real good signs early on. I think you could see that he could bring a lot of experience to us. We know Garrett (Kelly) anyway. He’ll work hard for you and he’ll do the ugly stuff which I don’t always think that we’ve been great at and then Deon Moore came on and looked like he could have scored when the ball dropped in the box and it looked like he just needed to head it over the goalkeeper but that never happened but he worked hard. He hasn’t worked with us. He doesn’t understand how we want to play.”

“I go away from here reasonably happy with the whole performance but I thought we defended miles too long in the second half. There was a lot of block tackles and a lot going on in both halves but in the second half I was expecting us to take the game to them but we didn’t get up to the levels.”

Stringer had a special word for those who travelled to Wiltshire to back the team. He said “The supporters were excellent today. They’ve come out. They’ve sung all the way through for us and that always gives me a sign that we’ve had a go and as long as we can keep them believing in us and we keep fighting, I will keep looking to see what I can do to improve us but overall today the performance was decent from the lads.”

Now out of the bottom four, the challenge is to keep out but Stringer knows that will be challenging “If the season ended now with where we are, I’d take that.” He admitted.

“This has been very hard this year. As a manager I do pretty much everything on my own. Kev (Watson) does the coaching but the recruiting and everything like that, it’s tough to try and get the right players that we know but the lads who came in today, are they going to hit the ground running? I can’t tell you that. I can only hope.”

“You go off the quality that they bring to us, and they’ve all played in the league above. We have to be precarious for where we are. It’s going to be like that from now until the end of the season unfortunately. I think that we’re probably going to get some good results and probably going to drop some results then it’s just what the teams behind us do.”

“We got ourselves into a cup final (Kent Senior Cup) on Tuesday night, which is something to look forward to, but the league programme is everything that we’ve got to try and do week in week out.”

“We’ve got a tough game at Tonbridge (on Tuesday evening) who we know will be a good side but we’ll just keep fighting and as long as the boys have got that bit of spirit in them and when we can start winning back to back games, that’s when that bottom section will start to open up and anybody that does start doing that will cause a problem for the teams that are sitting down there, including ourselves.”

“So these boys have to understand that one point here today is a good point, and we haven’t lost, but in the same respect we’ve still got plenty of work to do to get us out of it.”

Picture supplied by Dave Budden.