WHAT an important result that was for England in Turkey at the weekend!

I thought they produced a very solid performance and it was vital for football as a whole.

It raises the profile of the game for all the right reasons when the national side does well and we all needed a lift after the week's events leading up the game, with the recent rape allegations against players and the fiasco surrounding Rio Ferdinand and his missed drugs test.

Our own experience of the drugs testing squad came about five years ago when they turned up at our training ground in Belmont with a list of all our players.

They drew the names out and selected three pros and two trainees. There was no question of carrying on with training, they simply whisked the players off to Edgar Street where they provided the samples before they were allowed to return.

The whole process took about 30 minutes - at Old Trafford, where you have the training ground next to the club, I suppose it would be no more than 10.

We haven't seen them since other than occasionally after games - I think they've been concentrating more on Football League clubs. I read over the weekend that neither Yeovil nor Boston, the previous two Conference champions, were tested during their league-winning seasons.

To give Rio Ferdinand the benefit of the doubt in his case, people do forget things, particularly professional footballers! But the more cynical might say that an extra 36 hours allows the system to get clear.

I think the FA have taken exactly the right stance, though, otherwise it leaves the system open to anyone to abuse.

We were disappointed with our level of performance against Dagenham on Monday night and Richard O'Kelly and I analysed the video of the game long into the night.

We were drawn into playing too many long balls when our game plan all season has been to pass the ball.

We know that we're a better team than the performance that went out on Sky showed. Some people have been saying that we're a lucky team and that our bubble would burst, so, if our performance on Monday night failed to show other clubs what a good team we are, then we're not too worried.

If at the start of the season we'd been told that a third of the way in we would be top of the table and two points clear we would have been delighted.

*Graham Turner was talking to Richard Prime.