Eastleigh 0, Aldershot Town 0

SHOTS boss Danny Searle has said that he has no intention of just looking for a point when they host Harrogate at the EBB on Saturday.

The admission came hard on the heels of watching his side claim a useful point at a bitterly cold Silverlake Stadium against Eastleigh on Tuesday night in a game of few chances on a suspect pitch.

While Eastleigh ended a poor run of four successive defeats with a point against the Shots, Harrogate are flying at the other end of the table as they hunt up promotion to the Football League.

“There’s no way we are setting out on Saturday to get a point, just like we didn’t set out tonight to try to get a point,” said Searle.

“We want to win the game, we want to win all of our games, but what we have got to do is what we didn’t do last time we played them and that is make sure in certain situations that we manage the game better. But we’ve got to be realistic about it, they are challenging for the title for a reason, so we’ve got to make sure we do our due diligence on them and we work hard to make sure it’s as tough a game as we can possibly give them, and we know that if we did that that we have got the capability to hurt anyone.”

Harrogate currently sit second in the National League behind Barrow and are sure to prove much sterner opposition to Aldershot than Eastleigh did on Tuesday night.

But Searle’s men will take on the North Yorkshire side without any fear as they look to continue stockpiling points and creeping away from the dreaded relegation zone. Tuesday night’s point moved the Shots up to 16th, five points above the drop zone but within eight points of the play-offs in a tremendously competitive division.

“The target is that every game we go into we want to get something out of it and that just keeps putting the points on the board,” said Searle, who gave a debut to former Torquay United centre half Jean-Yves Koue Niate on Tuesday night.

“We assess every four or five games where that leaves us and we look up the table, but you’ve always got one eye on behind you because you’d be silly not to. We just want to win as many football matches as we can and the boys are more than capable of getting a few more on the board.”

Backed by a vociferous following of 307 fans out of a crowd of 2,130, Aldershot arguably had the better of the game, with Niate looking solid and assured on his debut while neither keeper was particularly tested.

That said, Shots striker Mo Bettamer threatened to steal the points but was thwarted by home keeper Max Stryjek and crashed another effort into the side netting.

And former Shots favourite Scott Rendell was well shackled all night.

“I rate him very highly and I think he would have loved nothing more than to have scored against us on both occasions, so credit to our players for wrapping him up and looking after him,” said Searle, who was largely satisfied with a point on the south coast.

“The positive was that we’ve had a really comfortable performance in a sense of I didn’t think they ever really looked like they were going to hurt us, the negative was that I think they were there for the taking and if we had been a little bit more clinical we could have won the game.

“The pitch wasn’t great but we still tried to play, and there were some great passages of play from us, but because of the pitch at times that little bit of end product wasn’t necessarily there but one of the things that we are trying to do is assert ourselves on the game and the boys did that well tonight.”