Littlehampton Town boss Hand praises players after AFC Portchester are beaten
Littlehampton Town are going in the right direction again thanks to a 3-2 win over AFC Portchester at The Sportsfield.
George Gaskin and Dave Herbert scored to put the Marigolds two up inside 23 minutes but Tommy Scutt and Josh Clack brought it to 2-2 with goals just before the interval.
Matt Storm got what proved the Golds’ winner 20 minutes from time, moving his side up to 13th in the Isthmian south central table ahead of this weekend’s visit to Hayes and Yeading.
Hand said: “It felt like a real moment in our season. If you looked at our bench, we had two 16-year-olds, one of whom, Max Chester, who came on for his debut having never played in men’s football before and was absolutely brilliant.
"We were depleted but Rob Malila played at centre-half for us when he’s normally a full-back so we’re missing a lot of people, but a lot of players really stepped.
"Simply we asked the defenders to defend and the strikers to come to the party and that’s exactly what they did.
"Dave and George are scoring goals at the moment so confidence is high.
"We’ve got a nice run of fixtures – a couple more home games after we go to Hayes and Yeading on Saturday and we’ll have people coming back from injuries and suspensions, and a couple of new signings.
"So Saturday’s win felt really, really good. We could have easily folded after having such a great start and then going to 2-2 against a massively experiemce team with loads of quality who are bang in form.
"To see the game out defensively was brilliant. Everyone had to dig in and they did – it was a really brave performance and I couldn’t be happier.”