The Green Lions pulled themselves within four points of safety in Isthmian South Central with their 2-0 victory away to already-relegated Badshot Lea and now have four more games in which to try and climb the two places they need to get out of the relegation zone.
Manager Tony Vance believes there could be a twist or two to come yet while remaining realistic about his side’s predicament.
‘It’s easy to talk about the ones that got away, but I do all my stats and we’ve thrown away 18 points from where we’ve been winning after 83 minutes or drawing – and that’s going to cost us probably,’ he said.
‘The table would look a lot better if that wasn’t the situation, but it is what it is.
‘If you look, we did really well on Tuesday night against Raynes Park Vale, could have nicked a win, [against] Westfield could have hung on maybe, and then South Park, that ridiculous 97th minute winner, which cost us as well. Ultimately the table would have looked even better then.
‘I think when you look at it there in tabular form, it shows that we’ve still got a fighting chance. So it shows that when I keep saying we’re not giving up, you can see there is a little bit of a glimpse.
‘It’s a massive, massive ask, but if we won all four games, then there’s teams like Horndean who are getting dragged into it and I can’t see them getting enough points, so we’ve got to keep doing that.
‘If I was a betting man, it wouldn’t happen, but we’re going to try.’
GFC sewed up the win over Badshot Lea in the first half with Ross Allen and Jacob Fallaize getting the goals from Charlton Gauvain assists.
It was their eighth victory of the season to take them up to 33 points and although they remained 20th in the table, they are now one point behind Ashford Town, who drew at Ascot United, and four off Metropolitan Police, who lost 3-1 at Westfield.
Horndean and South Park are both on 39 points.
‘We had to win, simply, otherwise it was game over really,’ Vance said.
‘It was a comfortable win. We had the right attitude, the pitch was horrible, conditions were awful, so it wasn’t a great game of football, if I’m honest. But, what we did was we looked at that and played a certain way and got our rewards early on and then got the second.
‘Second half we were a bit lacklustre. We had a lot of final third entries, but we weren’t ruthless enough or the quality wasn’t quite there.
‘We probably could have won by four or five, if I’m honest, but 2-0 and Guernsey FC, it’s always a nervy situation. But Josh [Addison] didn’t really have a save to make.
‘The important thing was three points. It would have been nice if we’d have got a few more goals, but in a funny kind of way, it’s quite difficult to shift from the momentum of backs-to-the-wall defending for your lives and suddenly being on the front foot. We haven’t really been able to do that much this season, so it took a while for everyone to get used to that.
‘But everyone knew the importance of the game and the fact that we had to win, so the attitude was spot on and I’m glad we got that one out of the way, and we can move on.
‘Now we’ve got some tougher games, and it’s really, really important to now try and get as many points as we can because we’re still in fighting, just about.’
GFC host Southall in their next game on Sunday at Victoria Park, kick off 2pm.
Over Easter weekend they will travel to Binfield on the Saturday before playing host to stuttering play-off contenders Kingstonian on Easter Monday in the Green Lions’ last home game of the season.
Vance’s men complete their league campaign away to Harrow Borough on Saturday 26 April.
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