Dartford delivered the perfect response by putting Dulwich to the sword on Saturday. Questions were being asked about the Darts after they lost to fellow play-off contenders Chelmsford last week.
But they re-established their grip on second spot in National League South as Alex Wall fired in a hat-trick during a 4-0 win over Dulwich. “It was a great result, especially off the back of what happened against Chelmsford,” said Dartford assistant manager Christian Jolley. “We needed to bounce back and we changed things up, changed personnel, changed system and it worked brilliantly.
I thought we gave a good professional display. “We’ve got a good depth in the squad now and we’re in a position where we’ve only really got Charlie Sheringham on the injury side of things so that means people are really competing and training has been really intense and performances have gone up. “We needed a spring in our step and we know we’ve got a busy couple of weeks coming up so we needed to try a different system to see what options we have and how players figure in that and give people something to think about.” Dartford made five changes to their line-up while the likes of Pierre Fonkeu and Jack Smith did not even make the bench against Dulwich.
Samir Carruthers was not used during the 90 minutes and Jolley admitted there were various factors behind their decisions. “The whole squad have participated massively in getting us to the position we’re in now and it’s one of those bitter-sweet moments where you want to play every minute of every game,” he said. “However we need to win and we need to find players to win.