Hakan Hayrettin let Jack Barham take the applause of the Maidstone crowd after his latest hat-trick, then joked: You were average.

Hayrettin substituted Barham immediately after the striker completed his third treble of the season in the Stones’ thumping 4-0 victory over Havant.

He received a well-deserved ovation as he made way for Hady Ghandour but there was no immediate “well played, son” from Hayrettin.

“I said to him as he came off, ‘I thought you were average,’ but that’s obviously not true,” said the Stones boss, after his side maintained their four-point lead over Dorking at the top of National South.

“It’s just my way of motivating him and getting him to do a bit better.

“I thought he was outstanding, his movement today was good, the goals he took were good.

“The third one is typical Jack Barham, Jack in the box, the other two he’s got on to things, hasn’t he?

“When you’ve got someone like him in your team who’s going to run and chase and hassle, it spreads and that’s what we want, we want it to spread around the team so everybody notices the hard work he’s doing and others are doing.

“Last week he didn’t do it (in a 3-2 win v St Albans) and I dragged him off because I thought it was the right to do and if I hadn’t done that, I don’t think we’d have won.

“This week, we saw a new and improved Jack Barham and he was amazing, and so was everybody.”

Barham scored twice inside eight minutes against play-off hopefuls Havant, whose boss Paul Doswell changed the system that had seen them go seven games unbeaten.

Joan Luque made it three with a penalty before half-time and Barham completed his hat-trick in the 89th minute, with his 15th goal of the season.

Hayrettin had been wary of the Hawks’ threat but United blew them away.

“This was the one game that I said if we were going to get tripped up, it would be these lot because they’ve got real quality in their team,” said Hayrettin.

“We don’t know why he’s made changes after being seven unbeaten, maybe because he’s paying the team some respect and he thought he needed to do that, but we handled it really well and our game management, which was the most important thing, we got it spot on.

“My message at half-time was don’t think for one minute the job’s done, don’t think you’re going to go 3-0 up and you’re going to cruise away with it.

• Report: Maidstone 4-0 Havant

“We were in a similar position the week before (blowing a 2-0 lead against St Albans before winning in injury time) and your game management and your mindset is vitally important to see this through.

“We grinded it out because we knew they’d changed the way they play, they went more direct, they’ve tried to get full-backs pushed in to isolate the centre-backs and they did it a few times but we dealt with it and I’m overly proud to be the team’s manager tonight and since I’ve been here.

“For this Maidstone team to keep a clean sheet and score four against them, I’m really, really pleased.

“Working hard is hard work and without that, I don’t think anyone’s going to achieve anything.

“My message to my team is you’ve got to keep working hard to nullify the likes of Havant and that’s what we did today.”