Dominic Samuel admitted he lifted a weight off his shoulders after scoring the winner at Maidenhead on Tuesday.

The Ebbsfleet striker came off the bench and netted within nine minutes for his first goal since November and only his third since linking up with the club.

“That was a weight lifted off my shoulders so now I want to maintain that and score more regularly in the games coming up,” said Samuel.

“When we’ve been up and down in games, as a striker you want to try and score in every game.

“It’s been a long time coming since my last goal. Chances like that in games don’t really come often, so when they do you have to take them and hit the target.

“I’ve always been taught to reverse the ball from where it’s come from and I caught the keeper a little bit off-guard so I’m grateful that I scored.”

Samuel was left out of the starting line-up on the back of a below-par performance against Hartlepool last Saturday.

He admitted that it was important that he was ready to go when called upon by boss Dennis Kutrieb.

“It's a team sport and that’s why you’ve got to have a big squad,” said Samuel. “You can chop and change it and as a player I’ve got to always stay ready.

“That’s the main thing, especially where we are at the moment, you can’t afford to be upset that you’re not starting. You’ve got to be confident and when your time comes again, you’ve got to take it.

“It’s great, especially after what happened to us on Saturday. On the pitch you can see that we’re starting to get stronger, defensively, which I feel was a little bit lacking in past games. Now on the training pitch all we’ve been doing is our defensive shape and it’s starting to pay off.

“There’s no problem in switching up our game in going forward and keeping the ball on the floor, we’ve not had problems with that, so hopefully we can put everything together and start changing the season around.”

Ebbsfleet are out of the bottom four and Samuel wants to ramp up the pressure on the teams above them in the weeks ahead.

“It’s a massive confidence-booster,” said Samuel on climbing out of the drop zone.

“I haven’t really been looking at the table, I’ve been concentrating on the games but we’ve got to keep that confidence going for the rest of the season.

“This is the prime time to start getting the goals and turn things around.

“Hopefully teams above us will start to get a nosebleed and panic as they need to win games, and that can work in our favour because the second half of the season is always a different ball game.

“We’ll remain cool, the gaffer is good at that and keeping calm heads in the team, so we’ll continue to work on the training pitch and take each game as it comes.

“The squad, if you were to look at us on paper, there are familiar names who have played in the Football League.

“No matter what team the manager puts out it’s a strong team, there’s no first and second team, so it’s good that we’ve got a squad like that and it can help us going forward.”