Director of football David Norman has set Wingate & Finchley the target of achieving a club record points total in the Ryman League Premier Division.

Norman was in charge three years ago when the Blues achieved their best ever finish of 13th, amassing 59 points, and his minimum aim is to match that tally this season.

Wingate are currently well-placed to reach that target – even after their stormy 3-1 defeat at Hendon on Saturday, which they finished with nine men, they are still eighth in the table with 38 points.

“We’ve come a long way,” Norman told Ham&High Sport. “We need to add in a couple of places, just to strengthen the squad, but overall we’re very pleased with what we’ve done for the first half of the season.

“Hopefully we’ll use that as a platform for the future and it’s just about putting the building blocks in place to make sure we’re a secure Ryman Premier side.

“Our goal is to improve on what we’ve done before and what we’re targeting is 59 points, which is the highest Wingate have ever achieved at this level – that’d be an improvement for us.”

Referee Andrew Aylott incurred the wrath of the travelling Blues fans on Saturday with two controversial red cards – the first of them to skipper Marc Weatherstone for what seemed an innocuous push on Kezie Ibe.

The official then dismissed a second Wingate defender, Ahmet Rifat, after he appeared to tackle Hendon’s Peter Dean cleanly – with both decisions also resulting in penalties.

“There were three or four key decisions in the game which I felt the referee could have done better on, but we’re not going to use him as a scapegoat,” added Norman.

“The sendings-off didn’t help, especially when we were on top. I think if we’d had 11 on the pitch, we could have maybe crept back in and got a result.

“But on the whole I think it was a fair reflection of the game – Hendon were the better side overall and over the 90 minutes we weren’t good enough. We were good in patches.”