Ashington open season with six-hit show

The goals flowed in each half with Lee Mason and Lewis Suddick both notching braces with one apiece for Dan Maguire and Craig Spooner.

Skinner - who admits that he never gets too high after a win or too low after a defeat - emerged from the dressing room afterwards with a broad smile on his face and said: “It was a good start to the season.

"We’ve tried to work the players as hard as we could pre season and we asked them to start with a positive performance for the first league game – and to be fair, I don’t think anyone from an Ashington perspective can be disappointed with what they served up."

“The players) have set the standards so it’s up to them now to go on. We’ve brought some really good players to the club; we expect to be in and around the business end of the division but that doesn’t come easy – that comes with hard work and making sure we apply ourselves properly - and all of those things the players did today.”

He continued: “On today’s showing, the players are where we want them to be. We try to tailor pre season in a certain way; we put a little bit of detail into how the fixtures fell and if you look at the last three games (of pre season), we played against teams higher up in the pyramid.

"We were disappointed with some of the things we did in those games but we knew it would stand us in good stead for our first league match of the season when again - without being disrespectful - the competition, the opposition and the level of which they play at drops a little bit from facing South Shields, North Shields and Blyth Spartans.

" It was about making sure we could assert ourselves on the game and I thought we did that.

“Again it’s about keeping standards high and managing the game state making sure you do things correctly and we did all of those things.”

Ashington are back in action on Saturday (August 6) when they take on Newton Aycliffe in the extra preliminary round of the FA Cup.