'Nowhere near ready' - Dorking Wanderers boss Marc White having 'sleepless nights' over Chesterfield clash

Wanderers have actually gone unbeaten in pre-season but they haven’t faced the calibre of teams that the Spireites have and they have failed to keep a clean sheet in their six outings. White’s men have beaten Leatherhead 5-4, Mousehole 2-1, drawn 1-1 with Horsham and 2-2 against Walton & Hersham, Bognor Regis Town and Farnborough.

Dorking are hoping to make the transition from part-time to full-time football and White admitted that he had got his pre-season schedule wrong

After the final friendly against Farnborough last Saturday, he said: “It has not been a great pre-season. I messed up because we went to the Tuesday-Thursday mornings and we still had midweek games so we have kind of found it hard. The coaches can only work in the time they have got and when we have played on a Tuesday night we have not been training during the day so there were two weeks when we were having just one morning session. It is very difficult to build momentum. I think the players have struggled with that. It has been fragmented at best.”

These two teams clashed on the first day of last season but this time it is at the SMH Group Stadium and White admitted he will be having ‘sleepless nights’ over how to get a positive result against the Blues.

“I think we go into the Chesterfield game definitely nowhere near where we want to be,” he said. “It would have been great to have a home game in the first game against maybe an unfancied team to get ourselves moving.

“It (Chesterfield) is definitely going to be a tough one that. We will have to come up with a game plan to combat Chesterfield. I think we are going to give them a lot more respect than we normally do opposition but I just feel like, if I am honest, the continuity that they (Chesterfield) have kept with the signings they have made at the back end of last season puts them in a really good stead this year. Their team building has been quite good and I have been impressed with the way they know exactly what they want to do. They are very good title contenders and we face an uphill task.”

White added that the focus in training this week will be making sure his players are ‘fresh’ and ‘sharp’ for the trip to Derbyshire.

He said: “Definitely not looking forward to Saturday. We are going to have a sleepless few nights working out what the plan is going to be but we will be there to win, we will give it a go.”