Whitton: 'There's a gulf between us and the top teams'

Colchester United still have a lot of hard work to do if they nurture any dreams of flirting with the Nationwide League Second Division's promotion race.

That was the view of U's manager Steve Whitton after watching his team get cut to ribbons by top-of-the-table Millwall in a 6-1 Boxing Day massacre at the New Den.

Whitton had also seen his Layer Road squad gifted a narrow 3-2 pre-Christmas win by bottom side Oxford who committed defensive suicide after fighting back to level at 2-2.

The U's boss said: "The Millwall result proves there is a big gulf between the top teams and us.

"It shows us how much hard work we still have to do if we hope to get into a position to challenge for promotion.

"On our day we are good enough to beat anybody, but too many of my players under-performed both physically and mentally. We all lost our battles on the day. I can't understand why, but so many people clearly were not up for the game.

"We are all shell-shocked by what happened."

The U's were routed by a well deserved hat-trick from highly-rated former Maldon Town striker Neil Harris, plus two goals from Paul Moody and one from Paul Ifill.

Whitton added: "Every one of us is disappointed with our performance, but Millwall are without doubt the best team we have come across this season.

"We were totally outplayed at times by a good all-round team with class and strength in all areas of the pitch and with very good finishers.

"But football is all about ups and downs. I try not to get too down when things don't go right, like in this game, just as I try not to get too carried away away when things are going well for us.

"All we can do now is recover from the shock as quickly as possible. We face another big game at Rotherham on Saturday and the boys are already concentrating on that."

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.