With maximum points in sight Saunders speaks following his side’s 1-1 draw after a late leveller from Billy Bennett handed hosts Sheppey United a point on Saturday afternoon.

In a match plagued by injuries the Hawks escaped with a point, and the manager was upbeat despite conceding a penalty kick late into the day.

“I’m pleased with a point. Bearing in mind the injuries that we suffered: Ryan Warwick is obviously a loss for us, we lose that edging in midfield; Charlie Lambert we felt it was too soon for him. I had hoped to get rest into him [Lambert] yesterday but injuries during the game forced him to play.

Joel Daly we had to patch up, he played through a slight knock and then obviously in the game we lost Will [Miles], Kai [Brown] and Deshane [Dalling] to injury so, all in all, it’s a tough place to go, volatile crowd and at the end of the day a draw was a fair result – it was end to end, it could have gone either way.”

“I felt we edged the chances. I would have liked us to be a little bit more clinical in front of goal but sometimes if you can’t win, you don’t lose and it was one of them. I’ll take the positives rather than the negatives and we take a point on our travels and move on.”

With a multitude of injuries making life hard for both Saunders and his squad, we asked if the constant switch in personnel affected the second half performance.

“Yeah it did. We couldn’t get into any sort of rhythm because we were putting square pegs in round holes. We were asking players to play out of position and we’re moving people around. Every five minutes it seemed we’ve got an injury and we had to make a change – all of yesterday’s subs were due to injury so yeah, it effected our rhythm if you like.”

The Hawks have a week to prepare for next Saturday’s FA Trophy visit to Isthmian Premier League side Folkestone Invicta, and Saunders was swift to show his relief at the few extra days rest.

“Yeah that’s a blessing for us because we haven’t got a game on Tuesday – it’s very rare to hear me saying that because I want to play every other day and so do the players but I think in hindsight we can get a rest into a few, work on a few things during the course of the week and hopefully be in better shape for next Saturday.”