We won the County League but I didn’t massively enjoy it
At that stage we were all but down, and heading for the County League for the first time in almost 70 years. Did that dampen your enthusiasm for the job? When I applied for job in the January, I was confident we could have kept them in the league.
We would have had a side that would have been stronger than the one that brought us up the following season and one that would have kept us up.
We’d then have had those players for the following season, been able to add to the squad, to strengthen, and then who knows? But football, and life, is all about ifs and buts and in the end it just wasn’t to be. Some of the supporters have since told me that going down was a good thing as the club needed a season of rebuild, a reset, but I believe it set us back three years.
When we came in, in the April, we rang all the players and discovered we only had 13 out of 35 who wanted to carry on! Tom Vickers did us a bit of a favour by playing through, even though he was injured, but we were threadbare for the last few games.
We knew at half-time of the match at Faversham that we were down and those last couple of games were all about just putting a team out to get us through to the end of the season.
Having dropped out of the league, how confident were you that we could bounce straight back? After a difficult couple of years, the club was in a state of flux so they just had the aim of achieving a top three finish and maybe challenging for the title.
But, having spent the previous two seasons in the County League, we were desperate to get straight back up and I think we put ourselves under a lot of pressure because of that.
Supporters expected us to walk it but we knew it wouldn’t be easy because clubs were going to look at us as their cup final.
We knew if we went a goal behind then they’d park the bus but, equally, if we went in front then we had the firepower to smash sides and, in the end, that’s invariably what we did.
We had guys like Doddy, Boz, Evan, Pammy, Biff, all guys who could score goals so we were capable of having a go at teams and breaking them down.
But we had a few setbacks along the way, like losing to Broadbridge Heath and Eastbourne Town and going out of the FA Cup and Vase early on, but the only thing that mattered was getting out of the league and in the end we won it fairly comfortably.
To be honest, I didn’t massively enjoy it because of the pressure we put on ourselves and it was just a relief to get out of there because we knew just how difficult it is to get out of the County League. Look at Eastbourne.
They pushed us all the way but they’re still in there, five years later.
Dom Dia Paola was talking to Mark Wells