Ebbsfleet boss Danny Searle has insisted his squad haven’t become bad players overnight.

The Fleet suffered a National League opening day horror show at Gateshead last Saturday, losing 5-1 on their travels.

The result was tough to take for Searle, who had previously been impressed with the quality his players had shown throughout pre-season.

“We’re still confident in what we’re doing,” stated Searle. “You can’t build long-term success on every time something goes wrong you rip the script up and change what you’re doing.

“If this was November and that type of performance was put in, and it had happened on several occasions in that period of time, then you are starting to look at it and say maybe the tactics aren’t right, maybe the philosophy isn’t right, maybe what we’re doing isn’t right - and fully justifiably as well.

“But this is the same team people were drooling over seven days earlier. You don’t just lose it completely - all we did was lose it on the day.

“That’s the biggest message we’ve given to the players. You were all very, very poor on Saturday but you’re not very, very poor players. There’s a big difference.

“Everyone is allowed a bad day at the office, unfortunately for Ebbsfleet on Saturday we had everyone having a bad day at the office. We take that on the chin, we hold our hands up and it was nowhere near good enough from everyone involved. We need to make sure it’s better.”

One crumb of comfort could be that the big defeat is out of the way on the first day of the season. But Searle doesn’t necessarily agree that’s a positive.

“A few people have said that,” noted the Fleet boss. “If we just accept it as that we would be doing ourselves an injustice from our standards’ perspective.

“However, that is the reality, there are 45 games to go and lots of team lost on the first day of the season. Regardless of whether we lost 1-0, 3-0, 4-0 or 5-1, we would still have the same number of points on the board.

“The disappointing thing was the manner in which we lost the game and that’s the bit we need to address and make sure it never happens again. The response from the lads has been excellent to be fair. They recognise their part in it.

“Collectively, we’ve looked at it and gone what do we need to do to ensure an Ebbsfleet fan never has to watch that level of football again? That’s what we’ve been working on this week. Most of pre-season has been about that and that’s why I’m confident it’s just a blip.

“If you’d watched us in the last friendly against Crawley, you’d never thought in a million years we’d turn in that performance against Gateshead but it happens sometimes. That’s what makes football such an entertaining sport.

“Any criticism that comes into the players and the club, at the end of the day I’m in charge and I’ll take that. Let’s leave the players alone, let them get back to work and concentrate on being better against Barnet.”

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Next up for the Fleet is Barnet, who arrive at Stonebridge Road this Saturday on the back of a 2-1 loss at FC Halifax.

Ebbsfleet then make the trip to Yeovil on Tuesday night and Searle conceded the reality of their opening run of fixtures.

“We’ve got a tough start,” he admitted. “If you look at the first six games, there’s two newly-promoted sides with momentum from last season who have heavily invested in their squads and three of the play-off teams plus Woking, who have done a lot of business as they want to be in and around the play-offs this season.

“That’s the reality of the league. The next month isn’t that dissimilar and that’s the quality of the league. I’ve said this from day one - the bottom line is we need to better than we were last season.”