Plus details of tonight’s CITYLIVE coverage

SAINTS boss Steve Castle described his side’s 0-0 draw with basement side Lewes on Saturday as a “shambles”.

City dropped back into the bottom three of the Blue Square Bet South table as a result of the draw with neither side providing anything to warm the 338 spectators on a bitterly cold afternoon.

“Any time we’re expected to win, any time when we’re favourites like Beckenham Town… when we’re expected to win the game which we should have done (we don’t),” Castle said afterwards.

“No disrespect to Lewes but they weren’t the same team we played down there but they fought tooth and nail. We should, with what we’ve got here, have more quality and we should have won that game comfortably.

“You can’t keep giving the ball away. We ended up, the six crosses we got in in the first 10/15 minutes that’s what we wanted but none beat the first man.”

Young strikers Inih Effiong and Dom Petrucci struggled to make an impact with Adam Everitt’s late header the closest City came to a winner but Castle says that would have been undeserved had it gone in.

“It’s a great save but we deserved nothing. If we’d have got three points it would have been a travesty on Lewes’ part. I say it how I see it…today that was a shambles,” he said.

“We’ve got to have a degree of patience with the front men. We’ve had some great performances out of Inih and he’s been our saviour on a couple of times around the turn of the year. It’s just his work rate wasn’t as we wanted it.

“We missed the likes of Pelayo Gomez and Ollie Palmer and Ben Martin but that’s no excuse, the team that went out, I say they’re good enough they weren’t, but that’s two points missed in my opinion.”

The Saints welcome local rivals Boreham Wood to Clarence Park (tonight) in another six-pointer. The Saints hammered their neighbours 3-0 on New Years Day but since then Wood have undertaken a major overhaul of their playing squad bringing and Castle says his side will have to fight for the points.

He said: “It’s going to be a fight all the way for every single point. You’ve got to work and we didn’t do that (against Lewes).

“It’s still one defeat in six so I’ll take that and If we can get a win on Tuesday I might calm down a bit.”

The Herts Advertiser will be providing its CITYLIVE service tonight. Updates will begin around 7.30pm.