Despite performing well at Dartford, Welling United came away from Princes Park empty handed. After the game, Peter Taylor felt that his team hadn’t done quite enough to get anything from the game.

“Defensively we were disappointing. The game of football is not only when you’ve got the ball. The game of football is when you haven’t got the ball as well. In recent weeks we’ve really improved. 

“We’ve got a little bit more solid but today we went back to the old ways of conceding goals that the opposition didn’t have enough to do to score. We’ve got to make sure that if anybody scores against us, they’ve got to be good goals but today they were goals where we lost the ball and made some poor decisions.”

Different people have different perspectives as he explained “I look at our goals and think they’re good goals and I look at the goals that we concede and say they’re bad goals, you can’t win, but I thought that it was a really, really good first half. I’ve got a lot of respect for Dartford and a lot of respect for Steve King. He’s got a good team here but I thought we matched them in every way in the first half so I was proud of the players. It was just that the goals that we conceded was just frustrating.”

Although there was much to take from the game, the bottom line is that it was another defeat and that is the thing that is a concern to Taylor. He said “The first thing that we’ve got to do is to win another five or six matches to make sure that we stay up. That’s one thing that is the priority of the team. 

“You want to work with a young group, you want to improve them but I can assure you that this is the youngest crop that I have ever had. At the back we’ve got two twenty-two year olds and two nineteen year olds. They are young and they are learning. I think that they’re going to be decent players. It might cost us a little bit in games like this but eventually, they’ll learn and get better.

“You’ve got a hungry group of players here who are not too worried about basic wages. They’re more interested in minutes. They want to be on the stage. They want to show eventually what they can do and hopefully, for them, they do okay and they get a good move at the end of the season.”

Danny Parish was left out of the team that had drawn at Braintree, and Kristian Campbell came in as Taylor looked to nullify the threat of Danny Leonard. Taylor explained “When Leonard looked good on Tuesday (for Dartford against Ebbsfleet) I thought it was when Ebbsfleet didn’t have protection behind or in front of their left back and I explained it all to the players. 

“I explained it to Danny Parish. It was unlucky for Danny because he played wide left against Braintree but I didn’t think that he could play the role that Kristian did. Then Kristian began to get a bit tired so we had to be careful there as well but that was the reason that we did it.”

Taylor is now turning his attention to next week’s game at home to Chippenham. “If we turn up next week and play like we did today in the first half, I’m happy.” He said “Our supporters were terrific today, and there were more of them which is good, but I’m not sure that they realise how young our team is and we can’t afford experience. 

“We’d love some of the players that Dartford have got, and Maidstone have got, but we can’t so we’re learning by mistakes on the pitch. Our four goals against us, I’m sure that I’m going to look at the video and be disappointed, but apart from that we actually defended less today because we passed the ball more and we played a very good first half.”

Picture supplied by Dave Budden.