HALSTEAD Town manager Mark McLean felt his team cleared an important hurdle as they came away from Harwich & Parkeston with a full Thurlow Nunn League division one south points quota last weekend.

Like they have been elsewhere in recent weeks, the Humbugs were depleted by injuries and unavailability for their trip to the Royal Oak, but won 3-2 to stay second in the table ahead of Friday night's game against Brightlingsea Regent Reserves at the Milbank Stadium.

McLean was pleased to see his team bounce back at Harwich after their 4-1 cup defeat by Coggeshall United a few days before and is now hoping that a number of players who have been missing recently will be back for the visit of the R's reserves on Friday.

“There are plenty of lessons we can learn from the game at Harwich," said McLean.

“Harwich have a good record at home so no-one goes there and gets easy wins and they have proved that they will fight to the end.

“They do not stop, but I was pleased with my boys that we recovered from the Tuesday game (against Coggeshall United) and didn’t lose two in a row.

“There is too much about my team to let it happen and I do look forward to the day when I have a full quota of players because that excites me.

“We’ve had big players like James Regan, Conel Dunlop and Charlie Pleace missing, but we should be getting players back next week.

“We have a squad big enough to deal with personnel missing but I never expected it to be so many from the defence at the same time but that’s the way it has been.

“There are times we’ve had to dig in and we’ve shown that a lot at times this year, but I think we fully deserved the win at Harwich.

“They are no mugs but we deserved that win and had we been more clinical, it could have been more, but I just wanted us to go there, graft and concentrate on another league win.

“It was another important win on the road for us.

“The game at Harwich, barring unforeseen circumstances, was the last big one to get through and I think things will start to settle now.

“I fully expect Conel Dunlop, Charlie Pleace, James Regan and Jordan Pavett to be back available for us so we’re really starting to tighten up now.

“We’ll also have Chris Harris coming back in the next week or so as well, but the thing I loved about Harwich was that we had a number of boys taking their chances in the team.

“At important moments, we still looked a good side."

Two Tom Cook strikes and a long-range opportunist strike from Joe Jones earned Halstead the points at Harwich and while he admitted his team switched off at times allowing the Shrimpers to make the score closer than he would have liked, McLean was pleased they got it right at critical times.

He added: “I’m not sure it was the best game to watch, but it was very open.

“I keep talking about who I don’t have defensively at the moment and how that affects us with our organisation, so I wasn’t surprised it was as open as it was.

“That’s where we are struggling and the two goals we conceded were gifts.

“It’s like it was against Coggeshall in the game before and we shouldn’t be conceding like that.

“It’s little moments where we drop off too deep or we’re not closing the lines enough because there’s not a natural communicator there.

“So we’ve been flying by the seat of our pants a bit, but I always know we have enough going forward and I felt it should have been more comfortable in the scoreline at Harwich.

“I had said to them at half-time ‘you’ve done the graft, now I want the quality’ and I felt we got that in the first 15 minutes after half-time.

“We got a foothold and started to move the ball more clinically, getting the players into the game who were going to influence it and we got two goals from it.

“However, we got involved in their game, we switched off and allowed them back into it.

“It came from us dropping off, but we scored the third and that proved enough."