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One down, nine to go – that’s the message from Ebbsfleet as they aim for National League survival.
Fleet started the second half of the campaign at the foot of the table and assistant boss Tristan Lewis has revealed how many wins he believes it will take to secure safety.
“We think we needed 10 wins out of 23, you normally need 49 points to stay up,” said Lewis, after the Fleet got the first of those victories against fellow strugglers Wrexham last weekend.
“I’ve been around this league a long time. You know it’s between 48 and 50 points that tends to give you a chance so the points target is whatever it takes to stay up.
“We changed the shape because we need to win games – draws are not good enough.
"Suddenly when you win a game if you follow it up with a point away from home than that’s not a bad result.
“You have to win your home games, it’s been difficult to do that here.”
Defeat to Wrexham would have left Fleet stranded at the foot of the table with other teams in the fight for survival picking up vital points.
Asked if that meant the Fleet had picked up three points from a must-win game, Lewis responded: “We’ve all been around football long enough to know that you can get cut adrift, especially in this league, where there are no easy games and everybody is capable of beating you.
“Look at the stats, is it two defeats in nine, is it no wins in five? – You can spin it however you want.
“When you’re down the bottom if I’m honest then every game is a must-win. We spoke about it this week, and when it’s a six-pointer against a team around you, yeah, it probably was a must-win.
“It’s easy to say that afterwards when you win it, if you lose it you probably say it’s not.”
The despair that greeted Fleet’s defeat at Barnet last week was replaced by hope and a distinct mood change around Stonebridge Road.
Fleet know exactly the task in front of them – and Lewis revealed how deep some of the conversations have been in the past seven days.
“There are two r-words,” he added. “It was a reality check and we had words.
“I’ve been relegated at clubs but I’ve also dug my way out of it at clubs and there’s a certain mentality you need to do that.
“I think it was just a case of who in that dressing room has been relegated. Do you know what it feels like? It’s not pretty, it affects people, it affects jobs, it affects careers. So, it
was mentioned because it has to be.
“There’s 22 games now left but at some point we had to face facts that we were bottom of the league.
“The fact that we’d conceded 46 goals in 23 games was completely unacceptable.
“We questioned a lot of things on Tuesday. Mentality was a word that was mentioned a lot.”
Fleet travel to Eastleigh on Saturday with striker Josh Umerah back in contention after completing his three-match suspension.
