Ebbsfleet United are expecting their biggest crowd of the season for Saturday’s must-win game against Hemel Hempstead.

The club has distributed a thousand free tickets to local schools, businesses and community projects as part of their 2015 Community Day.

Fleet’s average attendance so far this season is 907, but organisers are hoping up to 2,000 will be inside Stonebridge Road.

Manager Jamie Day said: "We need to excite the fans, we need to get them on our side, and that will dictate how we play.

"If we start well and we’re positive, the crowd will be the 12th man for us. It’s down to the group of players we’ve got to win enough games to get us into the play-offs."

Ebbsfleet have picked up just 11 of a possible 30 points since Day was appointed manager in December. That’s left them eight points adrift of the play-offs with only 11 games left.

Day said: "We’ve made it more difficult than it needed to be. We’ve drawn games that we should have won and we’ve lost some we should have drawn. It’s down to us to get that gap a bit closer.

"We made a lot of changes when we first came in and I’ll stick by that, whether we make the play-offs or not. It’s been more difficult than I thought it would be and results are not what we’d have liked since we’ve been there."

Read the full story in the Gravesend Messenger.