Keep the wins coming says Ian Allinson as St Albans City target the play-offs

A boring 1-0 win was what St Albans City’s manager Ian Allinson wanted and he got his wish – with the three points against Dulwich Hamlet more than making up for the lack of entertainment at Clarence Park.

Sam Merson’s penalty after 18 minutes was the only goal of a dull National South contest but the success keeps Saints on track to challenge for a play-off place.

The former Arsenal and Luton Town man said: “The conditions didn’t help and neither did the quality of the pitch. They weren’t conducive to allowing us to keep the ball.

“There were a lot of bad bounces and the wind was swirling.

“And you could tell from the number of opportunities both teams had that it wasn’t a good game to be involved in.

“But I have to take full positives from the fact we won a game of football 1-0.

“We’ve played a lot better than that in the last three weeks and ended up drawing.

“We kept a clean sheet which is really good and the back four were excellent. They had to deal with a lot of balls played in and played over the back of them and they dealt with them all.

“Dean Snedker hasn’t had to make a save apart from one in the first half.”

Saints moved up one place to 10th thanks to the victory but remain eight points adrift of the top seven.

And after three successive 2-2 draws, Allinson needs his side to continue turning one point into three if they are to close that gap.

He said: “We’re under a bit of pressure with the number of goals conceded but as I said to the players beforehand if we want to push on this season we’ve got to start winning games.

“We hard to work extremely hard to nullify Dulwich’s strengths but when we did create a number of chances we didn’t have the composure to finish the game off.

“That was probably the one area where we could have done something late on but our end product and decision making wasn’t at the level it should have been.”