Colchester United boss Mick Wadsworth today slammed Macclesfield Town's Moss Rose pitch as "The worst I have ever seen for a Football League match."

Angered and frustrated by his team's powder-puff performance when surrendering their eight-match unbeaten run on the relegation haunted Cheshire rival's paddyfield pitch, Wadsworth said: "It was as bad a pitch as I've ever seen!

"There are so many regulations concerning Football League grounds these days," he pointed out, "But none of them state what condition the pitch must be in."

He added, somewhat tongue in cheek: "There are regulations stating there must be so many toilets situated in certain parts of the ground.

"And that there must be so many hamburger stalls within so ex-amount of yards of each other and so many crowd control barriers per 1,000 people.

"The actual state of the playing pitch doesn't seem to matter and that bothers me a lot."

Almost two thirds of the Macclesfield pitch was heavily sanded in a bid to combat thick mud, but it was so bad that players from both sides were sinking in to a depth well above their boots everytime they put in a challenge.

"The state of the pitch is no excuse because both teams had to play on it," said Wadsworth.

"We deserved nothing from the game and we got nothing from the game," he said when summing up his team's dismal 2-0 defeat at the hands of their relegation-haunted second division rivals.

The result ended the U's eight-match unbeaten run and the disappointed Layer Road boss said: "My first taste of defeat was not nice - it was very bitter.

"We didn't deserve a thing because we were poor. Macclesfield were meaner than us and fought harder, tougher and longer than us.

"We displayed little if any strength of character. We were neither vibrant nor tough enough and were second best from the start to finish - it was not so much losing, but the manner of our defeat that bothered me.

"We went to Macclesfield knowing it was was going to be hard to earn a result, but after missing three golden chances to score in the first half we proved yet again that we are unable to keep a clean sheet."

Wadsworth said: "I learnt a lot about my players on the day and now I have got to make sure we work our socks off and don't let it happen again."

There was some question about the validity of the Silkmen's first goal, a Richard Landon header that rebounded from a post into U's keeper Carl Emberson's hands.

Wadsworth said: "There was no debate as far as I'm concerned. The linesman was positioned well and gave it. We have to accept he was right."

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