There was more disappointment for Welling United as they were blitzed at home by Chippenham Town. After the game Mark Doig spoke to manager Rod Stringer to get his thoughts on the defeat.

Due to ‘terrible news’ the night before meaning that manager Rod Stringer was ‘not in a good mindset’, he watched most of the first half from the stand but came down into the dugout before half time.

Then, after the game, he held his longest debrief with the team since joining the club before speaking to the media.

He said “We got blown away, to be fair. I’ve not seen us be as bad as that, especially defensively. For the first couple of minutes, I thought we started off alright. I think we should have gone one-nil up and then, all of a sudden, the game just opened up.

“It was quite alarming, the way that we let the game get away from us. I don’t know whether it is characteristics, whether it was the shape, whether your relying on players to turn up. When you look at Chippenham, from front to back, they had a game plan, an identity, everybody gets involved in phases of play, does their job, keeps the ball and to be fair, they were very clinical.”

Injury to Rhys Lovett one week earlier meant that a replacement goalkeeper was required. One was identified and trained on Thursday before the deal fell through and another one, Jordan Gillmore, was signed on Friday.

Stringer said “I felt for our goalkeeper. We had to bring Jordan in today. I’m not blaming Jordan at all. I didn’t even meet him until this morning, before the game, and you have to ask him to come in. He’s never worked with us before, never trained at all.”

Stringer continued “I was very, very disappointed with us in the first half. We gave some of the players a bit of an opportunity here today on the back of Tuesday, and I’m not blaming them either, but just that bit of balance in there, I think that’s the problem we’ve got.

“Some of the players show us at times that they’re doing very well then you give them other opportunities and them sometimes you question did they do very well?

“Second half was a little bit more of a token gesture performance. We looked a little bit more at it. We had a go but we needed to really go and score early. As the time went on it was always going to be more difficult.

“They scored, second half, but we had thrown a lot at them. Yet again, we did a lot of throw it at them, we got a lot of balls in good areas, but we don’t do a lot of working goalkeepers and that’s a bit of a concern because we’ve got to find other ways.

“I always say there’s three ways of winning games. Play them off the park, run them off the park or fight them off the park. Today, I felt second half we had a go physically, we looked a little bit more stable. But the first half, I thought whatever we tried to do we got undone and we got punished and they scored from it.”

Images courtesy of Dave Budden