Dennis Kutrieb admitted he endured a “tough week” after losing the home match to rivals Dartford.

The Ebbsfleet manager has spoken about how the two derby defeats over the festive period affected him - and how he snapped out of it.

There was plenty of talk among Fleet fans over whether Kutrieb was the right man to lead the club forward in the second half of the season after four straight losses in National League South before Saturday’s convincing home win over Weymouth.

“I haven’t felt the noise because I’ve focused on the main things which is football and my boys on the training ground,” explained Kutrieb.

“Honestly, I didn’t get any noise at all after the [second Dartford] game. Obviously I did get the noise [at the game] but nothing apart from that.

“In my position, you need to be focused. You can’t get carried away with a win, a loss or with noises. If I lose my head, then the players will lose their heads as well. We need to stay focused.

“The Christmas period and the New Year was terrible but I have to say we played Sunday and then Monday was bad but from the Tuesday I was only looking forward to this period now.”

Kutrieb tried to put the Dartford defeats in perspective. He understood how much those results hurt the Fleet fans but pointed out there are bigger battles outside of football.

“The good thing in football is you can experience really bad moments but you’re able to change it around a few days later,” he said. “You can’t do it if you’re an Olympian, it’s every four years.

“Sometimes in life as a human being you are struggling with family, they have health issues and die, you can’t ever speak to them. They are things that make me sad and struggle.

“But in football, you always have a chance to make it better and you need to put your focus on that. In life you don’t always have a second, third, fourth chance, it’s just gone and you’d love to get another chance.

“In football it can be really bad - and it was bad in the last two games - and I had a tough week before the first and second game against Dartford.

“But after the second game, I said this is not for me and I can’t be in a bad mood, get carried away or overthink it.

“I’ve tried to be positive and that’s what we did with the boys. We spoke to them and got a great response from them.”

With no winter break in England, Kutrieb decided to analyse and regroup in a 48-hour window when the season reached its halfway point for Ebbsfleet at the turn of the year.

They collected 48 points from their first 23 games and Kutrieb believes a similar return in the second half of the campaign should be enough to take the title.

He explained: “We said last week to the players we’ve played 23 games, we can put everything to bed what has happened.

“The situation for me is that in Germany now you would break for four to six weeks. You can regroup, think what was good, what was bad and Chris [Franks, assistant manager] and me had two days to turn every stone around.

“We looked at what we’ve done well, what was not working and where we have to improve, what we need to do better. What we’d do in Germany in four to six weeks, we had to do here in two days.

“We told the players before Weymouth, we’ve got 23 games left to play, we need 15 wins and that’s the minimum we want to achieve.”