Manager Dennis Kutrieb insists Ebbsfleet strikers Dominic Poleon and Rakish Bingham will get even better.

The duo have 45 goals between them this campaign, already a significant upturn on the combined tally of 34 from last season, but the Fleet boss believes there’s more to come.

“There’s still a lot of room to improve,” said Kutrieb. “I’m not sitting here saying ‘yeah, they are done, they are fine and what they’re doing is perfect’.

“They can improve - and they know it. That’s the most important thing. If I tell them, that’s one thing. But if I tell them and they realise ‘yeah it’s right’, that’s what needs to happen.

“They need to understand it. If they don’t understand they’ll think we’ll let the gaffer talk and just do our stuff on the pitch, then it’s a different story.

“But everyone in this squad understands when we try to tell them why we want to improve them and where we want to improve them. We tell them exactly why and what we want to see, then they have a chance to improve.

“Some players listen, some players don’t listen. But in this squad, every single player tries to listen and improve.

“We work hard every week in training, we drum it into the boys and then it looks almost easy when they score goals. It’s not easy, by far, but you get the rewards if you work hard and first and foremost they are hard-working this season.”

It’s not just goals that have stood out for the Fleet boss. Bingham’s winning more headers than before, Poleon’s retaining possession better.

It’s the small margins which are adding up to bigger gains for the National League South leaders from their frontmen.

“Massive improvement from the start of the season until now - massive,” stated Kutrieb.

“The stats can show you not just the obvious ones from scoring goals, but assists from Dom, passing accuracy from Dom both massively improved. Raks’ heading duels massively improved.

“If I just talk about stats, I can tell you maybe minimum 10 things where they have massively improved from last season to this. They have the quality.

“I would never ask a player to do something they can’t do. Not one player in our squad I would ask them to do something they can’t.

“I’m pretty confident to say no one has ever worked harder with them than we do because we want to have them on the scoresheet. That’s what we do.

“It’s part of the game to score goals so you have to be ready and everyone needs to know where you will go.

“It’s always easy to do shape out of possession and what you do when the ball is not with you. But we have a season average of 63% possession so it means we have the ball six or seven times out of 10.

“We need to have solutions if we have the ball and that’s why we work very hard in possession as most of the time we have the ball. That’s why we work hard in possession and not just on what we want to do when we don’t have the ball.”

While it might be easy for Kutrieb and his staff to tell the players where they can improve, it’s another thing for them to want to get better.

But even experienced professionals within the Fleet’s squad are buying into that development.

“That’s where they get all the credit from me,” added Kutrieb. “They say ‘you are right gaffer, and we want to do better’.

“[We’re talking about] Dom Poleon and Rakish Bingham, for example, but it can even be an experienced player like Chris Solly or Luke O’Neill who have played everywhere in this country.

“They could go back to the changing room and think ‘yeah. let the gaffer talk, we’ve played everywhere and we know what we want to do, we know how we can play’.

“But everyone tries to do it. You had a very good interview with Mark Cousins, he is 36 and even he buys into it.

“We saw some great passing situations on Saturday where he passed it out, and in the second half when it was too tight, he went long or tried to put the ball in behind.”