Steve Brown felt his Ebbsfleet United players answered their critics on Saturday.

The Fleet had to play with 10 men for an hour at Hayes & Yeading after goalkeeper Preston Edwards was sent-off for handling the ball outside his penalty area.

But goals from Charlie Sheringham and Anthony Cook earned Ebbsfleet their first win on the road this season, Brown's side having lost 3-2 at Weston-super-Mare on Tuesday.

He said: "It’s obviously been a tough week. The knives were out this week a little bit but all you can ask the players to do is try to deliver, which, after half-an-hour, I thought was going to be very difficult to do.

"But when a team’s got a goal to defend, it just gives you that extra 10%. What you saw in the second half was a very disciplined and professional performance from a group of guys that were desperate to get three points and push ourselves slightly higher up the league.

"As a group, they’ve shown how united they are. It’s not nice when you have three straight away defeats. There's always that element of people getting on your back and they’ve answered a few critics today.

"There's a huge expectation on us to go and win games. There's not such an expectation on Hayes. A nil-nil is OK for them - it's not for us. That's the difference between the Hayes and Yeadings of this world and the Ebbsfleets. That's not being disrespectful to them because they will go and get results against the top boys because they're organised, they're disciplined and they've got some good attacking players.

"But to think 'it's Hayes & Yeading, they got relegated last year and got reprieved and they're not going to be any good' is absolute nonsense.

"If you think that, you don't really know anything about football."