DAVE Anderson insisted this week he is not ready to push the panic button yet at Harrow Borough.
Anderson’s men travel to fellow strugglers Wingate & Finchley on Tuesday night in the wake of being dumped out of the FA Trophy at Whitstable on Saturday – their sixth defeat in seven games.
It has left some stalwarts wondering whether all Borough have to look forward to in the remainder of the campaign is another backs-to-the-wall struggle against relegation.
Boss Anderson claimed the doom-mongers were premature and he was not subscribing to the idea the trip to Wingate was already ‘a six-pointer.’
“Whitstable is not the first time there has been a cup upset, so I don’t fall for the ‘where do we go from here, end of the road’ stuff.
“Wingate is no bigger than any other game. The day you get four or five points for winning a game instead of three is the day it is a bigger game. When you get to five or six games to go and you need to win then it becomes more pressurised, but you still only get three points for a win.
“At a different level of football and in different leagues you can earmark games as six-pointers, but in our division we can beat anyone in the league and anyone in the league can beat us so we don’t get too carried away with the idea of six pointers.”
Anderson is, however, struggling to reconcile the abject first half performance of his side against The Saints with that of the second half where, on another day, Borough may have snatched an unlikely replay.
While the faith in his mix of last year’s stalwarts and summer additions remains, he admitted the confidence gained from the recent victory over Carshalton had been bruised by events in Kent.
He added: “I’m not down and out and I’m not back to the drawing board either. I think the group of players I’ve got are capable, but they just can’t start like they did today.
“It is one of those games where you step back from it and scratch your head because you want to know how the same team produce in the second half what they didn’t produce in the first half.
“I’m genuinely disappointed on all sorts of different levels because I believed I was getting together a group of players that I could trust when they went over the line and today was a knock back of that belief.”
