St Albans City manager Ian Allinson is all set for a productive summer to add to what he believes is “a good group of lads” despite finishing the Vanarama National League South season with a 3-2 defeat at Eastbourne Borough.

Saints dominated at Priory Lane yet somehow found themselves two goals down to two Nathaniel Pinney strikes.

Yet they recovered with two goals in two minutes; the first from Sam Merson on 74 minutes, fired low under Jordan Holmes after a ball from David Noble had made its way through to him.

That was followed by a scorcher of a free-kick from Shaun Lucien, bent over the wall and into the corner.

But in the final minute of added time, Christian Oxlade-Chamberlain cut inside and fired over James Russell to steal all three points.

Allinson said: “It’s probably the story of the second half of our season. We haven’t defended well enough and we’ve conceded too many goals.

“Two goals a game in any league will cause you relegation problems if you’re not careful. There’s areas I’ve got to look at but we are scoring enough.

“I was so pleased with the performance but so disappointed with the result. The quality of our football was outstanding and we haven’t hit the target enough and our decision making in the final third, we never picked out the right person.”

Allinson was in reflective mood afterwards as he looked back over the season but feels there are good foundations for a much-better year next term.

“We haven’t been good enough as a group over the second half of the year which is disappointing,” he said.

“But you have to look at decisions you make and the changes in January, although I felt they were right, maybe they took a little too long to gel.

“Once we lost a couple of games the confidence did fall a little bit and then maybe we had a little bit of blame culture with people not wanting to work hard enough for the team.

“We made the decisions to make the changes and brought some young lads who want to play for the football club and we’ve seen an upturn in form.

I really believe we’ve got a good group of lads here and I’ve got to go and work on bringing four or five in that will make us better than what we are at the moment.”