Faversham Town’s manager Ray Turner was upbeat about the Lillywhite’s playoff chances, despite his side’s 2-0 defeat against title-chasing Dulwich Hamlet.

Although his side has dropped to fourth in Ryman One South, still four points ahead of sixth placed Folkestone Invicta, Turner admitted the run-in would be difficult, as he said:

“It was always going to be.  We were never going to do this the easy way.  I can imagine this all going down to the last game, both at the top with Dulwich and Maidstone, and the playoff positions.  We are ready for it and I think the most important thing is that we are playing well.”

“There’s no problem with confidence.  We know they will be difficult games, like today was, but it is in our hands.  We have to make sure we hold onto that playoff spot.  We now go to Maidstone, and that it something to look forward to next Saturday.  I’m looking forward to it as it is great to be involved with big games, and we are putting Faversham back on the map.”

Two long-range strikes; Ellis Green’s taking an awkward bounce that defeated Simon Overland’s dive and a clean shot from Xavier Vidal with two minutes remaining, sealed the game for Dulwich, but Turner wouldn’t accept that his side had been outplayed.

He insisted: “You could say that in terms of the result, but they are a very good side and they obviously got the second goal very late when we were chasing it.”

“From my point of view, I’m really proud of the players and I felt we put in a really strong performance.  We’ve made them work really hard for the result, which was important, but at the key moments, I don’t think we’ve done enough in the final third.”

“The key was having that bit of quality and self-belief to get on the end of something.  They’ve defended their six-yard box ever so well and they’ve hung onto the result.  We’ve pushed them hard second half, but it hasn’t fallen for us in the box.”

“We’ve conceded two goals from long range, and Simon takes pride in not conceding from distance, but the first one has taken a real kick in front of him off the hard surface and gone from rolling along the ground to flying in the top corner.”

Although the surface at Salter’s Lane appeared to be reasonably lush after the recent bad weather, both teams found it hard to control the ball, and Turner admitted:

“I think we’ve got good football players and sometimes our surface doesn’t help us.  It was a difficult pitch to play on, very lively, but we’ve tried to play second half.  Maybe if something had dropped for us, especially at one-nil, we might have seen a bit of anxiety set in.”

Faversham will now look to bounce back from this result, and achieve a measure of revenge for the 4-0 drubbing by Maidstone earlier in the season, to keep their playoff hopes intact.

And Turner said that his players were looking forward to the match at the Gallagher Stadium, by adding “We’ve no problems with playing on a 3G, if anything it might let our players play on that surface.”