Hemel Hempstead Town boss Jones targets home comfort

Hemel Hempstead Town’s impressive revival under Mark Jones has continued over the past week.

The Tudors are now unbeaten in five matches and made it back-to-back victories in the Vanarama National League South with a 2-1 victory at Chelmsford City on Saturday after they had claimed a 1-0 success at Hungerford Town last Tuesday night.

Jones is now desperate to finally secure a first home win of the campaign but he knows his team will have to be at their best to do it this weekend when Hemel host current leaders Dartford.

“I have been really pleased,” the Tudors manager said.

“The spirit in the group is good and the lads are working very, very hard to get these victories.

“We are in pretty good form, we’re unbeaten in five games and we’ve only had one defeat in the last seven so, without getting carried away, it’s fair to say we are doing alright at the moment.

“But the important thing is to understand why we are picking up these results.

“A lot of it is based around a good work ethic and the players running hard for each other.

“We have been getting over some little hurdles over the past couple of weeks.

“We wanted a first clean sheet of the season, which we achieved at Hungerford, then the next thing for us to try to do was to win back-to-back games, which we did by winning on Saturday, and the next one we want to do is get that first home win of the season.

“This weekend is a game we can go into with a little bit of confidence.

“It will be good to be back at Vauxhall Road and we want to try to be positive and we want to try to cause Dartford one or two problems.

“But if we are to get anything from the game we are going to need an excellent performance and we need every player to be on their game because they are a good side who you’d expect to be up there come the end of the season.”

The Tudors were in control at Chelmsford on Saturday as goals from Alfie Cerulli and Craig Fasenmade put them 2-0 up but they had to hold on in the last 10 minutes as the hosts pulled a goal back before Dominic Morgan-Griffiths was sent-off for dissent.

“The important thing was that we won the game but the last 10 minutes put a slightly disappointing slant on it,” Jones added.

“We had a player sent-off for dissent, which is never a good thing, and we should never have given the free-kick away for their goal.

“I was hoping for a calm last 10 minutes but it turned into anything but that and we had to defend balls coming into our box and Nick Hayes our goalkeeper has made a couple of good saves.

“We lost a bit of control but, for 80 minutes, it was a very good away performance so you don’t want to come away thinking we weren’t very good.

“But we should have controlled the last part of the game better.”