Manager Harry Watling believes the Ebbsfleet squad he’s inherited need to improve their fitness levels.

The Fleet were noticeably second-best during their 2-1 National League defeat to Oldham last weekend.

New boss Watling has a string of injuries to contend with – striker Rakish Bingham has joined the likes of Luke O’Neill, Toby Edser and Jim Kellermann on the treatment table – and is conscious of asking for too much from those that are available for selection.

“We’re just struggling at the moment,” reflected Watling. “I’ve come into the job and, I’m saying this as respectfully as I can, the group didn’t have that solid foundation and base that you need in terms of robustness that you get in a good pre-season.

“We’re seeing that at the moment, we’re seeing a lot of players dropping off physically and I have to be honest, looking at the two teams on Saturday, Oldham were quite an impressive outfit so we need to address that.

“I expect more, I expect higher numbers, I expect higher output. I expect people to be running around more, sprinting more.

“At the minute we’ve got to do that gradually otherwise we’re just going to break all of them.

“If you had a pre-season with a group, you’d get that foundation in place for them to run and that running would match your style of play.

“That’s not quite there at the moment so I need to make sure that we get the right things in place to work that in.

“It's much more difficult to do it in the middle of a season but we’ve got no choice. We’ve got to roll our sleeves up and work properly.”

Read more: Ebbsfleet 1-2 Oldham match report

Watling also discussed his approach to the Oldham game, setting up defensively in the first half to ensure his team stayed in the match, only to concede a goal at the start of the second half which probably forced his hand earlier than he wanted.

“Two game plans in one game, really,” said Watling. “The first one was to try and frustrate which I thought we did really well in the first half.

“At the moment we’re shooting ourselves in the foot, we’re handing momentum to teams and giving them opportunities rather than them carving us open with quality. I think Oldham are a really good side but they haven’t cut us open.

“Both goals are mistakes again, that we’ve got to try and eradicate. In terms of the two game plans, we tried to be solid and structured and get into half-time with something to talk about which we did.

“Then the first goal forces your hand to change it, and change it again. When we went for it, I thought we were fantastic in that last 25 minutes, we changed to a back four and looked much better, we looked more of a threat going forward.

“We got the penalty and then you go ‘let’s enjoy being level and make it interesting in the last three or four minutes’ but we didn’t enjoy being level for long enough. Again, we handed momentum to the other team.

“Sometimes in football the pitch looks like it’s tilted, it looks like you’re playing downhill and the ball is being sucked into the goal. But we didn’t enjoy that for long enough, we didn’t have those waves of attacks and spells that you’d expect. Again, individual bits as they go up the other end and get a really poor goal from our perspective.”