A midweek cup defeat brought Kennington down to earth following a superb effort to topple the league leaders.

Fin Dent scored both goals, including a penalty, as Ton beat VCD 2-1 in the Southern Counties East Premier Division at Homelands last Saturday.

But they went on to lose 5-3 to lower-league Rochester in the Challenge Cup third round on Tuesday night - a result boss Dan Scorer said would serve as a wake-up call.

The league win moved Kennington up to 13th, seven points clear of the relegation zone, while long-time leaders VCD lost top spot to Faversham.

It was an excellent performance from Scorer’s side, whose 4-2 defeat in the away fixture was the catalyst to transform their season.

“The boys thoroughly deserved three points,” said Scorer.

“VCD, to their credit, were very humble and very complimentary of us after the game, saying we fully deserved it.

“We were certainly the better side on the day.

“It was pleasing to see us go out and perform the way we know we’re capable of.

“We said to the boys prior to the game, use the progress you’ve made in the last eight or nine games to go out and demonstrate to them just how much we’ve improved and highlight we’re a much better side than we showed at their place in early October.

“That game was the catalyst for us changing things up and improving the way we have, so it was nice to see it all come together. It was pleasing.

“It opens up a bit of a gap now on the sides at the bottom but while these games in hand are still there, it’s still wide-open.

“We certainly don’t believe we’re safe but our points tally now, to where it was last season, is quite significantly more, so we’re happy with that but we know the job’s definitely not done yet.

“Realistically, we need to get at least five or six wins between now and the end of the season which would make sure we stay up, but we want to try and do that as quickly as we can.

“We want to try and be comfortable and go into the last handful of games knowing we’ve had another tough season but we’ve stuck together again and put ourselves in a position where we can say we’ve done it a lot better this year.”

There were two more goals for Dent and one for Rajan Sahni in Kennington’s Challenge Cup exit against Rochester on Tuesday.

Level at half-time after battling back from 3-1 down, Ton looked set to push on but lost 5-3 to the Division 1 visitors.

“I was gutted because we’ve fared quite well in that competition in recent years and I fancied us to have a good run but for whatever reason we didn’t turn up,” said Scorer.

“Too many individuals on the night just weren’t quite at the races.

“To be honest, while I’m gutted, I’m quite pleased in a way because I think it’s humbled a few of the players again that maybe went into Tuesday night thinking we’d cracked it just because we’d beaten top-of-the-league.

“As we all know in football, one game doesn’t mean anything so hopefully that’s a bit of a wake-up call, brings everyone back down to earth a little bit and allows us to readdress one or two issues and bury them quickly.”

Kennington have a weekend off before hosting Fisher on January 18.

The break has come at a good time.

Scorer said: “It’s not a bad thing because we picked up a handful of injuries in the last two games.

“I think it would have been difficult to put out a strong side to compete against a side like Fisher if it was this weekend.

“So we're glad of the weekend off and hopefully we can reset, get everyone back next week and be prepared to go again because I think Fisher is as tough as it gets in this division.”