MATT Cusack believes Saltash United would have gone on to win the South West Peninsula League Premier West title if the season had not been curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Ashes trailed leaders Helston Athletic by 16 points when the campaign ground to a frustrating, but totally understandable, halt, but they had four games in hand on Steve Massey’s men and still had to play them twice.

It would have been a punishing schedule for the Ashes over the final weeks of the season, as they were still involved in the latter stages of both the Cornwall Senior Cup and Cornwall Charity Cup after a campaign where they scored an amazing 140 goals in 34 league and cup games.

However, Cusack – who resigned as Saltash manager soon after the season had ended to become head coach at Western League side Plymouth Parkway – believes they had the quality and depth of squad to see them through to glory.

‘I am immensely proud of how the season went and I felt we were on course to achieve something significant for ourselves,’ said Cusack.

‘I really felt we were in with a shout of winning the league title. I know Helston will see it differently, but we still had to play them twice, and I do genuinely feel we would have been league champions.

‘I set my team the target of winning multiple silverware, which was a new challenge for us, and that was a possibility as we still had two cup semi-finals to play.

‘With three competitions still to play for, I would have liked to think we could have won at least two of them.

‘If we had got through to the Cornwall Senior Cup final, that would have made it our fourth final in four years, but in order to do that we would have had to overcome Millbrook, who beat us in the League Cup, and full credit to them, they totally deserved it that night and we were really poor and off key.

‘My one personal regret is that that proved to be my last game in charge.

‘But in terms of the bigger picture, it pales into real insignificance in terms of where we have got the club to now as a force at that level.’

Cusack was confident he had the players to keep winning games through a hectic finale.

‘We had just made a couple of new signings just before lockdown.

‘We had signed Callum Hall, who was coming back to us from a higher level of football with Willand, and Ryan Lucassi had joined us from Callington, and we had two starting XIs available to us without having to dip into the second team.

‘That, of course, required everyone to be available every game, and everybody to be free of injury, which you are never going to have as a manager, but we made sure that, for that run-in, we had 22 players.

‘We were determined to attack the rest of the season on all fronts still, the weather had made it very difficult and COVID-19 means we will never find out what would have happened, but we had it all planned out.’

The Ashes had a strikeforce any other manager would have loved to have had available to them, with Ryan Richards and Sam Hughes notching an incredible 77 goals between them, with still at least 18 games of the season to play. But Cusack – who has taken Richards with him to Parkway – was quick to point out that the importance of the rest of the team to that duo.

‘They are as important as every other part of the team,’ he said.

‘They are ultimately the ones putting the ball in the back of the net, and make no mistake, they were important to us – and young Reece Thomson came in and made himself a force as well – and they were a real handful for any defence at that level.

‘But they were backed up by a tremendous team behind them, and I really didn’t see them above any other player in that squad, and more importantly, they didn’t see themselves above any other player either.

‘They knew they were important, and you want your strikers to be confident, but they also appreciated that they couldn’t do what they did without everybody else’s efforts in the team.’