DEAN KEATES welcomed the news that the National League season will continue but the Wrexham boss bemoaned his side’s poor finishing after their six-game unbeaten run came to an end.

There has been growing uncertainty over the 2020-21 season because of the coronavirus pandemic and clubs being told that future funding to get them through the crisis will be issued in the form of loans and not grants.

That led to clubs voting to decide whether the season should go on or is declared null and void.

It was announced on Thursday that teams in the fifth tier voted to keep playing and although Wrexham suffered a disappointing 3-0 defeat against Aldershot at the weekend, Keates is delighted that the Reds can continue their promotion challenge.

“It is great,” said Keates. “We want to continue.

“As much as I am annoyed about today, we want to play and we want to see the season through.

“We are in a good place and that is taking this result aside. We started, we continue and we keep going.

“It is not just about football, we are in a place now that the Welsh government has extended the lockdown for another three weeks and there is an announcement on the English side on Monday.

“There seems to be a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel that we may come out of this at some point."

Seven out of 23 clubs voted to end the season, with Dover chairman Jim Parmenter saying the bottom of the table Whites will not play its remaining fixtures due to financial hardship.

Clubs were given a slice of a £10m support package of National Lottery funds at the start of the season and Keates said: “There are a lot of things that need questioning.

“If it was judged on attendances, some of these teams who only get 500, 600 or 700 fans in have had as big as slice as the likes as ourselves, Chesterfield, Notts County, Stockport.

“They have had the same money as us so where has it gone in three months and they are saying they can’t continue.

“I don’t know the ins and outs of it all, that is me with the bits I know.”

Wrexham dropped to seventh after losing against patched-up Aldershot who took a 26th minute lead following a mistake by goalkeeper Christian Dibble.

The Shots benefited from a fortunate deflection to double their lead at the start of the second half before grabbing a third goal.

“We would like to be higher but you can’t win every game at this level,” said Keates.

“We turned up well for the first 15 minutes and we should have put our chances away; we didn’t and it cost us.”

Keates defended his decision to drop Dan Jarvis - one of the best players in Tuesday’s 2-0 win over Woking - in favour of bringing James Horsfield into the side, saying he wanted an extra defensive midfielder to deal with the Shots’ threat.

“They go a lot long into their main striker so I thought if they were going to put it on us, and we didn’t pick up any second balls with not having an extra body just in front of the back three, and they were picking up balls in little pockets, we would have a problem,” added Keates.

“Hors has played in there many times and played Football League in there so I thought I would drop him in.

“They made vast changes, they changed the shape, and we had 15-20 minutes where we should have put the game to bed.

“We did enough in the first 15 minutes to say that it was justified in the change and we created opportunities; we just need to be a bit better.”