Danny Ward has revealed he would have been happy with 10 points at Christmas.

A win at Eastbourne Town on Wednesday would take Sittingbourne’s tally to 31 points and leave them fourth in Ryman League Division 1 South ahead of a trip to Hythe on Saturday.

Joint-boss Ward can hardly believe how well his side are performing, although they did lose 2-1 at home to Worthing last weekend.

He said: "I thought it would take four or five months to settle things down so if you’d offered me 10 points by Christmas, I’d have been happy with that.

"As it is, we’ve got 28 points and the five games we’ve lost have all been by the odd goal, so we could be sitting on any amount of points by now.

"We know the club isn’t ready to go up but we have a lot of good players and they’re learning all the time."

Eastbourne are in the bottom three but Bourne travel to Sussex short of players for a fixture postponed last month.

Ollie Gray (work commitments) and Ashley Ulph (away) are out while Joe Taylor (Achilles) and Russell Bedford (ankle) are struggling. Nick Treadwell serves the second match of a three-game ban.