Braintree Town chairman Lee Harding admits attracting regular crowds like the one they got for their last home game would allow them to challenge towards the upper end of the Conference Premier division.

A bumper attendance of 2,115 – the club’s biggest for a league game in more than 60 years – took advantage of the club’s offer for free entry to their fixture against AFC Telford United and while the 2-0 defeat wasn’t what the Iron wanted on the pitch, Harding said it was a success off it.

However, the Iron chairman appreciates that it will take more impressive performances than the one seen against Telford to get those numbers without the free offer.

He said: “There were a lot of positives and we learned a lot from it.

“Now we have to try to encourage some of those who came out to come back.

“The football was not as we would have liked and I think we were all left a bit flat by the performance, but we can’t criticise the town for its lack of interest.

“We tried to showcase it and off the pitch it has gone very well.

“We dealt well with the size of the crowd and it would be lovely to see those sorts of figures every week.

“We were looking at the receipt figures for if it had been a paying crowd and getting those sorts of figures week-in week out would make a huge difference to the budget that we could offer Alan (Devonshire).

“It would allow us to push on in this league and allow us to give Alan the resources to challenge at the very top of the table.

“To be fair to the paying public of Braintree, though, they need to be entertained and we need to earn those crowds.

“All the hard work was done off the pitch in encouraging them to come down, but performances like that won’t encourage them to come back.

“From the highs of the victory against Torquay and the manner of it, we couldn’t match that against Telford.

“One thing about us is that we are consistently inconsistent.

“As good as we were against Torquay we were poor against Telford.”