St Albans City’s preparations for the new Vanarama National League season took “a jolt” after their shock 3-1 defeat to Hertford Town.

The Herts Charity Cup loss on Monday saw City’s defensive frailties from last season raise its ugly head once again.

And shell-shocked manager Ian Allinson felt it had undone a lot of the good work over the pre-season.

He said: “I was really pleased with it until tonight. We’ve gone to Hendon, Biggleswade and Wingate & Finchley and picked up results.

“We had to dig deep and defend really hard against them, especially Biggleswade, and that’s what’s disappointing about this.

“We’ve had a hard pre-season and I felt there were a lot of positives from them, even the defeats.

“I said before the game that I felt we had a group of lads who were going to work extremely hard but for the first 45 minutes we were awful defensively and we got our backsides smacked.

“That wasn’t good enough and we have to improve defensively before Saturday’s game.”

That match sees Hungerford Town visit Clarence Park in the first of this season’s league fixtures and Allinson admits that he may have to rethink his team selection after what was looking like an easy decision before Monday’s defeat.

He said: “I’ve now got second thoughts. I’ve got to take in mind the Wingate game and the Hertford game and make a decision from there.

“There are a lot of difficult decisions to make this week but we have to improve defensively and it was a bit of a jolt.

“When we went forward we played some lovely stuff and got in some good areas but we just couldn’t defend.

“I’ve got to have a long hard think before Saturday about which defenders we play.

“I know we can do it as we did it at Wingate & Finchley the other night. I was really positive coming off that pitch with how we had defended.

“It’s not a poor thing to happen just before the start of the season. Hopefully it makes us realise we aren’t as good as we think we are and we have to go and work extremely hard to get a result.”

Kick-off on Saturday is at 3pm.