Ian Allinson was perhaps using a small amount of understatement after describing St Albans City’s 5-0 drubbing at relegation-threatened Hungerford Town as a “poor result”.

City had hoped to use the game at Bulpit Lane as a way of cementing their play-off challenge but three first-half goals blew that out of the water.

And in the end it could have been more than just the five, the performance being so bad that players felt the need to apologise to the travelling Saints’ supporters at the final whistle.

And the boss couldn’t hide his disappointment and hurt at the way the match unfolded.

He said: “It was a performance which I didn’t expect. We didn’t get to grips with their movement, their pace and their hunger all game.

“We had a good 15 minutes at the start of the second half but then we’ve given a really poor fourth and fifth goal away which makes it look like a really poor result.

“And to be fair it was.

“We were never really set to face I side play at Chelmsford last week.

“We have to look at what people have taken on board and whether they listened but we never got to grips with them.”

The game had seemingly been in doubt all week with the notorious Berkshire pitch suffering from last week’s rainfall.

But Allinson said the surface, which wasn’t anywhere near as bad as expected, could not be used as an excuse.

“You can’t blame anything,” admitted the City manager. “We just weren’t good enough.

“We’ve not defended correctly and that’s a shame because we’ve defended really well over the last few weeks.

“We’ve looked rally strong, really solid but we were all over the place.

“We were poor, our preparation was poor, our shape was poor and it was just a really bad day at the office.

“We can’t play like that away from home.”

Allinson did indicate he felt this was just a one-off performance.

He said: “Over the last 10 weeks we have had a really good spell and the players have been magnificent.

“It’s difficult and it was a bad day but I won’t call out any of the players as they have run through brick walls for me.”