I’m still registered as a player – the mind’s willing but the legs aren’t!

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Sadly our FA Cup run ended at the first hurdle with a 2-1 defeat at Tonbridge in a replay on Tuesday.

The first game on Saturday was one of our poorest performances of the past few weeks. We just never got going.

We should have had enough quality to get through the tie at home but fair play to Tonbridge, they played well as an away team.

Then on Tuesday the game was turned by Kelvin Bossman’s first-half sending off, apparently for foul and abusive language.

The incident happened on the far side of the pitch to me so I’m only going on second-hand information, and I want to wait to see the referee’s report.

But if that was what happened, I can’t ever recall anything like it, certainly not in high-profile games.

Industrial language is used at every level of football and sometimes a bit of commonsense is required.

The sending-off ruined the tie, certainly for us, but the 10 men that stayed on the pitch were superb. I might pick 10 men every week!

The boys were disappointed with the Tonbridge result but we’re all keen to get back on the horse, starting with the trip to Basingstoke on Saturday. If we play as we did in the second half on Tuesday we can get a result.

It will be a very tight game between two evenly-matched teams but we can take confidence from the display in our last league game, the 1-0 defeat at league leaders Eastleigh. Basingstoke are a very competent side at this level but we’ve shown that we are too.

These young lads are proving their worth every week, especially in defence. Not too many sides have conceded fewer goals than us and I can’t praise our centre-backs Charlie Wassmer and Dean Inman highly enough.

Tom Bird and Adam Everitt have both played at left-back and different times and done really well and young Anthony Furlonge, on-loan from Stevenage, has been playing his part at right-back.

They won’t be needing my help any time soon but what fans may not realise is that I am actually registered as a player.

You have to have 14 players registered two weeks before the start of the season and we didn’t have that number, which shows you how stretched we were at that time.

So myself, my assistant Tristan Lewis and my goalkeeper coach Delroy Preddie have all signed forms. I will probably play a couple of reserve-team games this year, mainly to help some of the younger guys’ development.

We had a skeleton squad on Tuesday and I was tempted to name myself in the squad for that – the mind’s willing but the legs aren’t!

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