Sittingbourne are on a quest this weekend as they make the short trip down the A2 to face neighbours Faversham Town in arguably the game of the day in the Isthmian South East with manager Reece Prestedge keen to keep winning games.

But the Brickies travel to the Aquatherm’s artificial surface knowing that for the first time since the 1-1 draw with Jersey Bulls on January 17th, they will be playing a League game. The weather has literally stopped the Brickies charge up the table under Reece Prestedge who has overseen Sittingbourne taking twenty-nine points from the last thirty-three at stake.

“We have to start again, start new, and we are all looking forward to it – I know the boys can’t wait because it gets us back to competitive games and it will be nice to be back.”

“It’s always nice to play your local rivals especially when you both have the same goals in promotion and hopefully our fans will come in their numbers and we will have good backing there!”

“They are a well drilled outfit with momentum which probably still comes out of winning SCEFL last year. They have a good squad and a good team – Tommy (Warrilow) is a good manager who has been there and done it, and results wise they deserve to be there in the top three!”

The Brickies are currently sixth, four points behind third placed Faversham but with a game in hand, but only a solitary point behind fifth placed Jersey but have played four fewer games. “We’ve just slipped out of the play-offs by not playing,” Prestedge told us.

“But being in there with games in hand is all well and good, but its only good if you win the games in hand in honesty, so we have to take each game as it comes as its going to be a lot of hard work and hard graft going Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday, Tuesday again for a while, but we have done it before so there’s no reason we can’t do it again!”

“It’s going to be difficult again with the games to play if you want to work on things in training, but we have had a lot of Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday now with not playing and so it’s helped getting all the info into the players. I am in no doubt though that playing Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday will help if we can keep winning as you just want to keep winning. So, we’ll see how Saturday goes and hopefully start a new run!”

Sittingbourne were able to get an important ninety-minute game time in last weekend at Longmead as both they and Tonbridge Angels had been rained off. “It was a good run out – one that we needed,” the Brickies boss told us.

“I think the boys put a lot of effort in and there were a lot of positives to come from it. There was obviously some rustiness, but hopefully we got that out before Saturday!”

“I want to win every game, so, my mindset won’t really change,” Prestedge admitted ahead of his first Swale derby in charge of Sittingbourne. “I want to do it for the fans and get a good result for them, but winning games is all that matters to me!”