Read James Bracken's post-match comments following the 1-0 loss to Kingstonian
I’ve said plenty of times that you have to win or learn and we have to learn from this. But we have to learn quickly. We can’t keep coming away from games with a loss.
We played fantastic today. The boys have done everything I’ve asked. We were compact, organised and mobile. We were a threat and everything you’d want from a football team to be. I can’t level any kind of blame across the board but you get one moment of absolute pure naivety and it cost us a goal and lost us the game.
It’s a tough one to swallow. If you get beaten by a side that’s better than you and are clearly second best across the pitch, you can take that collectively. But when it’s an individual error, it’s very hard to get your head round it.
That said, we have to stick by each other. It might be another player on another day. It is what it is. We need to ensure that individually and collectively, we are better from that experience that we’ve had today.
We had a few opportunities to score. Warren Mfula’s forced a good save from Tolfrey in the first half, another that he didn’t quite get a hold of. Reece Hannigan’s header that hit the post. It could’ve been very different. We opened them up in the second half. There were a few cynical fouls when we looked to break but the referee’s never stamped on it once. I thought the level of officiating was poor. On the lead up to the goal, there’s the most blatant handball I’ve seen this season – where he sticks his hand up above his head and pats it down, yet standing five yards away, he’s not seen it. Some of the decisions are beyond me.
Despite playing on Saturday, the team selection was fine, the performance levels were good and I never felt we had run out of steam. If anything, we were on top of them until the last minute. There’s no problem with the energy levels. That said, we’ve had 48 hours following an FA Cup tie and these lads are amateurs. It’s a scientific fact that it takes 72 hours to fully recover from a match. To ask anyone to do two games in 48 hours is a joke. From an FA Cup tie we can’t take lightly to a local derby and you want to perform for your fans. To put those two games together with one day’s rest is ridiculous.
100% I’ve seen enough to know we’ll be fine though. We’re at the level. Let’s get this right; we’re three points behind K’s. If you’d have said after four games that we’ll be three points behind them, I’d have snapped your hand off. K’s are no mugs. They’re an okay side. They’ve got some big name players and they’ll score goals. Remember, the other sides we’ve played were Folkestone, who you’ll expect to be up there as well as Margate. Merstham, we were far better than them.
We’re yet to play all of the sides that will be in the lower echelons of the league. If we play with the intensity as we did today, and Merstham in the second half and Folkestone for large parts of the game, then we’re there. We’re embracing it. We’re enjoying it even though the results aren’t there yet. It’s pushing us though and boys are having to step up and deliver to a better level than they were last year.
If we keep the belief, keep the workrate up and stick together, results will come. And when they come, they’ll come in threes and fours, like we’re used to.
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