Daryl McMahon laid down a challenge to his Ebbsfleet players after they lost 2-1 at home to Bromley on Tuesday night.

Defeat extended Fleet's winless run in the National League to six matches and left them just four points above the relegation zone.

After all the pre-season optimism, they've now got to dig themselves out of a hole.

McMahon said: "I’ve spoken to nearly every manager in this division in the last few weeks. It’s fine lines in this league to win and lose games of football.

"Anything that can go against us is going against us and only the strong survive that.

"You can feel sorry for yourself or you can be a man, stand up and show your character.

"I think you’ve seen again from my team they’ve got character and we won’t stop fighting. We’ll keep going."

Ebbsfleet conceded twice in the first 30 minutes before Jack Powell's free-kick at the end of the first half gave them hope.

McMahon said: "We had eight set-pieces in the first 25 minutes. They had one and scored from it and then got penalty.

"It’s disappointing but I can’t knock the players’ effort. There were some really good performances across the board.

"It's not the result we wanted but we have to keep believing and keep doing what we’re doing.

"You can see this group are believing. I wouldn’t say you’re enjoying your football when you’re losing but we’re getting after teams.

"We’ve made a lot of changes in the last two matches. The average age of the side, Saturday and tonight, has probably gone down to about 23.

"We have changed in the last two games and we will get errors sometimes with that but you’ll also get the exciting play we’ve seen at times.

"Sometimes it takes time. We’ve probably changed 12 games in to something slightly different.

"We’ve had Bags (Graham) come in, Cheek, McQueen, Powell, Ebou (Adams) and Magri.

"Did we have one player who was 30 tonight that started? Dave Winfield? Everybody else is 26 or below.

"For this level, it is a young team and that’s the way… Keds is still a good player, so’s Jukebox, so we’ve still got good players but it’s important we have legs and freshen up our team."

Familiar problems dogged Fleet again on Tuesday but McMahon was generally pleased with the performance.

"Individual errors across the season so far have cost us," he said. "But my football team tonight was a good team.

"You sit back and you watch the game and you analyse the game tonight, we played some good stuff, created chances and did a lot of stuff right, more than we did wrong.

"The fans were terrific. I think they’ve seen the effort the team put in, they can see we’re trying to do things the right way and everyone at the football club will keep doing what we’re doing."