WEALDSTONE manager Stuart Maynard described York City as ‘ambitious’ following the Minstermen’s opening defeat at Grosvenor Vale last Saturday.

Despite Dipo Akinyemi’s first-half opener, a second half that saw Max Kretzschmar tuck away a penalty, Callum Howe receive a red card and a late winner from Jaydn Mundle-Smith gifted Wealdstone three points on the opening day of the Vanarama National League season.

Wealdstone manager Maynard was surprised at York boss Michael Morton’s decision to switch formations, but took it as a compliment, and admitted that he is expecting City to be hoping for promotion this season.

“I thought it was a really entertaining game, a real good footballing game.” Maynard told the Wealdstone club media.

“They tried to play as well, we tried to play, I thought in the first half we both got into similar areas.

“Dipo the lad that they brought in was just in the spot and tucked it away, but it’s a really good start to the season.

“When you look at the start of the season it takes momentum from last season, we weren’t at our most fluent best but I thought we played really well in possession today.

“It takes a bit of time, it’s exciting times to come away with a win and put points on the board and that’s the main thing for us.

“I think they have a lot of players that are better than this level, they recruited really well in the Summer and they are a team that are ambitious and want to get promoted out of the league this season.

“With the type of money they have spent, they pay transfer fees for players which not a lot of clubs  do, but they have.

“They’ve stamped their authority on the game in that way, but it’s not easy to gel them quickly so it could take them a bit of time for them to gel their players properly.

“We don’t really look into too much on what they can do, we look at how we can affect the game, they played 4-3-3 all pre-season and changed to a 3-5-2 today to play against us, which is a compliment to us for the way we play.

“It’s pretty much every team we play now, changes the way they play because of the way that we can affect them.

“It’s a compliment to our lads and they executed the game plan in the end.”

Maynard also described the new stoppage time ruling to be ‘crazy’, after 17 additional minutes were added on by the end of the match.

“I think it’s crazy, it’s gone from one extreme to another. In the first half they’d add like two minutes on, and today they added seven.

“In the second half they added seven and I don’t think there’s been any stoppages, we’ve both made three subs each and that’s it.

“There’s been three goals in the whole game and we’ve played 17 minutes extra.

“It’s something we talked to the ref about after because they need to go away and look at it and get the balance right.

“It’ll cause injuries if they add too much time on with the intensity of the game.”