Ebbsfleet manager Harry Watling insists his squad can still turn their season around.

The Fleet sit 10 points from safety at the foot of the National League and are on an 11-game winless run following a goalless draw at home to Boston last weekend, the side immediately above them in the table.

Watling’s men have gone 332 minutes without a league goal but the manager believes they will get it right.

“That’s why I’m still sitting here,” said Watling, who confirmed there is an in-house points target set for survival.

“I completely believe it’s going to turn. It might turn in December, it might not turn until January.

“We’ve just got to keep ourselves attached to the pack. I get at the minute that we’re adrift but we’re a point slightly closer to the dotted line.

“I have started to look at [other] results and study where we’re going to fall in terms of the fixtures and pick up six-point weeks.

“We’ve got to put ones and twos together and then maybe threes and fours in terms of back-to-back wins. We’ve got to start to do some drastic things like that in order to turn it around.

“The only way you find belief and confidence is by working hard, putting the ball in the back of the net and keeping clean sheets. That’s easier said than done. It’s 100 per cent about belief.”

Watling has seen some green shoots of recovery since he took charge in September, but not enough on a consistent basis.

They won their first game under his leadership against Hartlepool but last weekend’s draw was the first time Ebbsfleet have kept a clean sheet since then.

“It’s about trying to put together blocks of performances,” he reflected.

“We haven’t managed to do that. I thought we were fantastic against Hartlepool to dig out the win, we were brilliant in patches against Sutton.

“At Maidenhead, I didn’t think we were very good and we could go through every game and say there was a patch there, and I liked us there and didn’t like us there. Ultimately, we’ve got to dig in and push forward.

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“[Last Saturday], we arrived to the second half feeling that we played quite well. We made a tactical, attacking change at half-time, taking Todd Kane off and putting Jephte Tanga wide to get another attacking player on the last line.

“We got the moment that we thought we would get and we didn’t quite deliver that final ball or final pass. That’s how it’s going for us at the moment.”

Even with players still being moved out on loan, the Fleet’s squad line-up on the back page of their programme is comfortably filling the space.

Watling says that presents its biggest challenge in terms of managing the people rather than having too many bodies out on the training ground.

“I listened to Graham Potter’s podcast and I thought it was brilliant,” explained Watling.

“He talked about the numbers he had at Chelsea and said it was the hardest job in football. I laughed my head off.

“He’s got multi million-pound players who are world class and he’s saying it’s difficult because he’s working with 26, 27 players - someone needs to send him our programme so he can have a look at that.

“It is what it is, I knew what I was getting into so I won’t be complaining about the numbers. I will be complaining about the fact I haven’t been able to select everybody.

“Only getting Luke O’Neill now, not having Lewis Page for the amount of time we’ve had him, Dom Samuel is a really good football player that we want to come back. Just naming those three alone and then add Jack Wakely and Nathan Odokonyero into that, there’s some big hitters that are out.

“We’ve got some out on loan, then you’ve got seven, eight, nine injured so that 30-odd goes straight down, anyway. It hasn’t been as extreme as that number all the time but you’re managing people.

“They’re not just names and magnets, they are people, so that’s the big challenge and managing the expectation of each individual player.”

Fleet visit Sutton United in the FA Trophy third round on Saturday before returning to league action at AFC Fylde on Tuesday.