George Elokobi was adamant the first of Matt Rush’s two disallowed goals should have stood in Maidstone’s draw with St Albans.

With the score at 1-1, Rush chested down George Fowler’s deep ball into the box and fired home but referee Lisa Benn felt he had handled.

The striker, making his first appearance since rejoining on loan from Sutton on Friday, had the ball in the net again in the final 10 minutes.

With fans unaware Reiss Greenidge’s initial shot had gone out of play, hitting the wheel on the base of the goal before coming back on, there was fury on the terraces when Rush’s latest effort was chalked off.

Stones boss Elokobi knew that was the correct call but couldn’t see why the earlier strike was disallowed.

“I thought Matt Rush scored a perfectly good goal,” he said.

“The second one came off the wheel of the post but the first one was a perfectly good goal and that was deemed handball.

“The officiating needs to be better.

“It was a good game, we shouldn’t be speaking about the officials.

“I don’t talk about officials but today was a poor showing in terms of where we are.

“There’s two good sides going at it here at the Gallagher Stadium and it’s important we don’t lose sight of that and make it about the officials.

“There were too many stoppages and not enough urgency to restart the game and this is just me saying it as it is.”

Report: Maidstone 1-1 St Albans

Antony Papadopoulos put Maidstone in front midway through the first half.

But they failed to build on the lead and were pegged back by Ken Charles’ second-half header before the late drama of the disallowed goals.

The Stones are 11 games unbeaten but have slipped a place to 12th in National League South, a point behind Tonbridge, who won at Weymouth.

St Albans may be in the relegation zone but had a new manager in ex-Norwich defender Ian Culverhouse and were tricky opponents.

“We knew it wasn’t going to be easy,” said Elokobi, whose side are five points off the play-off places going into Monday night’s rearranged game at Aveley.

“St Albans are always a difficult side to play against and we had to be on our A-game in terms of not letting our levels drop.

“We needed to match their hunger and desire, which I thought was there, and there were some good patterns, especially in the first 20-25 minutes.

“We got the goal but then we just slightly dropped our intensity and gave them a little bit of hope.

“We knew in the second half we needed to be more dynamic, we needed to up our levels again and make sure we tried to exploit the spaces we’d analysed and worked on in training.

“But I just thought we played within ourselves a little bit, we didn’t really penetrate them in the areas we got joy in during the first half in terms of stretching their backline.

“It was important we didn’t lose our focus but for some reason our clearances weren’t clean enough, we kept leaving them short and the ball fell on to their midfield and they were breaking on us.

“We needed to do something but just before we reacted, that’s when they got their goal.

“I was a little bit disappointed in the manner we conceded because there were a couple of crosses from that side, we needed to shut down that area and stop those crosses but we didn’t manage to do that.

“If you don’t stop crosses, at some stage, there’s going to be a good one and it was a good connection from their forward for the header.

“Sometimes you’ve got to look at it and say, ‘Let’s regroup and go again’.

“I thought we were the team that were going to win in terms of when we made our substitutions, they gave us another gear and we became more controlled in possession and territory and more patient in our build-up play in taking the game to them.”