DAN BATEMAN is confident Sumas can still compete at the top end of Hellenic Division One East this season, despite a run of five straight defeats in all competitions.
Wokingham and Emmbrook lost out 3-2 at home to Virginia Water in the league on Saturday, a result which sees them slip to seventh in the table and without a victory since September.
But Bateman retains the belief that his squad can quickly turn things around again.
“Of those five defeats, in four of them we’ve been very close,” Sumas boss Bateman told The Wokingham Paper.
“Four of them were good performances from us where we’ve just either run out of luck or made silly mistakes.
“To be honest, most of the defeats are coming from our own making at the moment. It’s things that we need to fix, but I’ve got all the belief in this squad of players.”
He added: “We started the season really well and now we’re going through a little blip.
“The key is to not get too high when you’re doing well and not too low when you’re not.
“We started the season really well but we didn’t get carried away because we didn’t think that all of the issues had gone away overnight.
“Some of the old issues have just raised their head a little bit.
“We’re giving away too many goals at the moment and we’re struggling to score as many as we were at the start of the season.
“These things come back. We’re working hard, we’re training twice a week and we’re trying to get back to winning games.
“I’m sure that once we do win one, then we’ll win six or seven on the spin because there’s nobody in this league that actually frightens me.
“We just need to make sure we get back to playing the way we can and the results will soon follow.”
Bateman is no stranger to firing Wokingham up to near the top of this division.
Along with former co-manager Matt Eggleston, Bateman guided the Sumas to promotion from One East in 2015.
But it has been a struggle ever since, coming straight back down from the Premier Division, which led to Bateman’s departure, and Sumas fared no better under Clive McNelly last campaign.
Coming into this season, Wokingham had won just 10 of their 64 league matches in the previous two seasons but Bateman, who retook the reins this summer, believes there is nobody in One East that his team cannot compete with.
“There is no stand-out side in the league this year,” he said.
“I think you can probably afford to lose four or five games and you can still win the league this year because the top five or six are all of a very similar standard.
“It’s about form and getting on a run at the right time.
“If you look at (league leaders) Bicester, we went over there at the start of the season and we won and they’ve been on unbelievable form since.
“One of our defeats was against Thame Rangers and I think they were on a seven or eight game winning run.
“It just takes a few results to get a run going and then you can make a difference in this league.
“I believe that by the end of the season, it does even itself out and I would expect us to be up near the top.
“But to obviously say we’re going to go and win it now is a big ask because we’re on a little bit of a bad run.
“But we won’t give up until the end, that’s for sure.”
