Welling United were hoping to go on a run of results but were thwarted by promotion chasing St. Albans City in an entertaining match at a sodden Park View Road. After the match the Wings manager, Peter Taylor, gave his thoughts.

“I was pleased with the start. I thought Chi (Ezennolim) put in a wonderful cross and Dipo (Akinyemi) had a chance of scoring it and then Joe Muscatt had a good chance of scoring it so that was a good start. 

“Then we concede a poor goal, and there were two errors in the build up for St Albans, so that was disappointing for us. Then we showed, I thought, really, really good character. I’ve got to say, as much as I’m disappointed with the result, I think our play on the ball was good. 

“They showed good character as simple as that because St Albans, they’ve got a few games in hand and if they win them, they’re going to be very, very high up the table. We matched them in every way so that’s very, very encouraging.” 

Ade Shokunbi put Welling ahead approaching half time but they conceded an equaliser two minutes later. Taylor said “I can speak and say its a disappointing goal for us to concede. St. Albans will say its a good move from them. I understand that but I was disappointed with that. We’ve had three goals against us today, all with little cut backs along the ground, and we’ve got to do better than that.”

Going on to the St Albans winner Taylor said “The third goal was from a poor free kick given away by us. Then they had a bit of build up down the right hand side and again its a cut back that got through two of our players which, to me, is not good enough defending so we got punished.”

Explaining the substitutions Taylor said “Ade was feeling his hamstring so we had to be very careful with him because he’s a very important player to us. We didn’t want to take the chance. 

“Danny Parish, that’s his first game for a while and he was feeling his quads a little bit. In the end I decided to put Aaron Barnes on to get up and down the right wing to, hopefully, try and get us an equaliser.” 

Team selection on a boggy pitch and played in constant rain, at times very heavy, was a challenge. Taylor admitted  “I would have preferred to have kept the same team that played against Dulwich but the three players that played in that game and were on the bench today didn’t train at all and couldn’t train. A couple of them had strains and little things like that so they were massive risks. 

“We had absolutely nobody else otherwise I would have put other people on the bench.” he continued. “Bradley Stevenson, you might have seen right at the end, he was struggling so that was the reason.

“Kristian Campbell couldn’t train. He struggled against Dulwich. If you look at his performance against Dulwich he wasn’t running freely. He’s been to see somebody and we knew that we could take a chance today but they did say if you took the chance it could set him back. If Chi had got injured early doors and I needed a left back then I would have put him on but he was the last one that I was going to take a chance with. Tom Derry has got a chance of being fit at the end of the week.”

There have been many issues with which Taylor has had to contend this season but players being unavailable hasn’t been one of them previously. “We were talking just before Dulwich saying that we hardly had an injury now, all of a sudden, you get three or four in the same game so well get on with it. We’ll try and get everybody fit but probably, from today, I would say that Bradley Stevenson is struggling.”

Taylor will take stock of the injury situation but was not looking for excuses and was looking forward to the next match. “We’ll have a positive week. We’ll always take the opposition into account. We’ll have a good preparation for Chelmsford. They’ve been doing a bit better lately so its another tough game but it doesn’t matter who we play. If we get our act together on the ball, that’s going to be positive but we’ve got to make sure we stop conceding.”

Picture supplied by Dave Budden.