Herne Bay player-manager Liam Friend thinks Isthmian South East home match against Merstham will be a good test of credentials

Player-boss Liam Friend reckons Herne Bay’s match this Saturday will be a good test of their Isthmian South East credentials.

Bay will return to league action when they host Merstham.

Jamie Decruz’s men were play-off semi-finalists last campaign and already find themselves in the higher echelons of the table this time around in seventh, three points behind fifth-placed Herne Bay with a game in hand on them.

Experienced defender Friend said: “They have managed to keep most of their squad together that came fifth last year.

“They have got some really good players. If we finish above Merstham at the end of this season, we’ll probably be where we want to be.

“It will be a good test of where we are.”

It’s been a mixed start to this season for Herne Bay - knocked out of the FA Cup and the FA Trophy at the first hurdles - but they hope to have found some rhythm after back-to-back league victories.

“It’s important,” said Friend on the need for consistency. “If you want to be a team looking up towards the top of the table, rather than towards the bottom, you cannot be ‘Win one, lose one’.

“We’ve only drawn once in the league so some teams have lost less than us but they’ve drawn too many and that’s why they’re behind us. That consistency is key.

“But it’s important to not be massively looking at the table at the moment.

"If you take out the Jersey Bulls game (a 4-0 home loss) - where we weren’t where we needed to be - it’s been quite a few weeks since we performed really badly.

“Hopefully, that doesn’t put the mockers on it! Against VCD (a 2-0 win last month), we weren’t amazing, but we did the basics well.

“One thing we have done well is we have generally bounced back from defeats this year.”

For the second weekend running, all