Ward calls for charachter during Ramsgate's bad patch

Ramsgate manager Jim Ward has challenged his players to keep their season alive - by winning the Kent Senior Cup, writes Stephen McCartney.

The Rams travel to Tonbridge Angels for the third time this season on Tuesday night, aiming to reach the semi-finals of the county cup after Ward admitted the club are out of the Ryman Premier League promotion race.

“This time of the season is when we can find out who the proper characters are at this football club,” Ward said in his website notes on www.ramsgate-fc.co.uk.

“Since Danny (Ward) and I have been back we’ve had nothing but success and everybody loves it - the committee loves it, the fans love it, and the whole place has been buzzing for the last three seasons.

“But we find ourselves now going through a bit of a bad patch. Everybody knows what the reasons are, with suspensions at the same time as injuries to our big players certainly haven’t helped.

“So it’s a time when we find out about people. It’s allright sticking together as a unit, and I mean everybody - all the players, and the fans - this is when you find out what the club has really got, when things are perhaps not going proper.

“We find ourselves in a sea of mediocrity; we can’t make the play-offs, which are now outside our grasp.

“Of course relegation is another thing that won’t happen to us, so we find ourselves in a position where we could just turn up and play our games and go home again, win, lose or draw, but that’s not fair.

“It’s certainly not fair to the fans, because we’ve found ourselves loads of new fans this year that have braved all weathers and gone away to places they never dreamt of going to two years ago like Worthing on a Tuesday night.

“That may not seem a lot to some of these big clubs but we took 40-50 people down there, and to big games like at Tonbridge, Wimbledon and Folkestone.

“We’ve taken more people away to those games than what we used to have at home in the old Kent League and even at the start of the Ryman One days.

“So I think the players and the management owe the fans to make sure we just don’t roll over and say “right, the season’s finished, just get on with it.”

The Rams travel to Tonbridge Angels on Tuesday night, the only side that can claim to be their “bogey side” in the past two seasons and Ward revealed that he has no option other than giving some new faces a place in the team.

Ward said: “We also have the small matter of the county cup, the Kent Senior Cup, to look forward to so that keeps us bubbling over, and there’s shirts to be fought over and there’s also contracts to be fought for, for next season.

“We can’t give anything away lightly so let’s hope that a couple of lads come out and bang on my door “because the reserve team players will be played.”

“I’ve got no choice about it now as we’re thin on the ground and I look forward to the next ten or eleven games to see the character of Ramsgate Football Club.”

Having clinched back-to-back promotions that have seen the club go from Kent League football to the Ryman Premier League at a rate of knots, Ward admits that staying in the division should make everyone proud.

He said: “In the eleven seasons since Richard Lawson and Chris Payne invited myself and John Love to come over to Ramsgate Football Club, and with other assistant managers in that time, without looking in the record books I think there are only two seasons where I haven’t won a trophy of some sort.

“The other day someone brought this up and said “you won’t win a trophy this year Wardie.”

“We’ll, leaving aside the Kent Senior Cup, a lot of people might argue that the best honour we’ve earned this year is to stay in the Premier Division.

“At the start of the season we were 50-1 to win the league but we’re certainly rated as one of the four most likely to go down.

“I want to get out of the 40s and into the 50s points wise so we are a bit more comfortable.

“As I said earlier, there’s still time to be busy and to look and see what’s happening. So again the pride comes in, it certainly comes in for me.

“So let’s look forward to the rest of the season as a group and see what comes through.”

As Ramsgate’s game against title contenders Chelmsford City was postponed due to a waterlogged pitch at Southwood Stadium on Saturday, goalkeeper Paul Wilkerson will serve the last of his three game ban on Tuesday night against an Angels’ side that beat Harrow Borough, courtesy of Ray Powell’s strike after just 48 seconds.

Visit club websites:

www.tonbridgeangels.co.uk &  www.tonbridgeafc.co.uk/forum

www.ramsgate-fc.co.uk