Town boss John Still admitted his picked the wrong team in a performance that had “no positives” at Wrexham on Friday night.
“The best team won, playing quick, smart, move the ball football,” he said after the 2-0 defeat.
“We never really got into that and I think I picked the wrong team, I actually do.
“It’s easy with hindsight, but having said that we never played well enough.
“If I’d have picked the other team we might not have played well enough, but I’ve got no complaints with the result at all, none at all.
“I’m the manager, so it’s my responsibility. I pick them, I train them, I coach them, we haven’t played well, so I don’t take away from the responsibility of that at all.”
The manager was naturally disappointed with the individual displays of his players.
“We’ve done an enormous amount of work on the training ground on deliveries, balls into the box, it’s been the backbone of our work,” he said.
“But our crossing was awful, absolutely awful. They attacked off our crossing, we never got it past the first man, it was an awful performance.
“We’ve got an guy there, Paul (Benson), who’s capable of scoring 30 goals but he needs the service and the crossing was poor.
“Every time we got into the final third, we were too long delivering and when we did deliver, I think Shaun (Whalley) hit one great cross in second half, but I can’t remember another good one.
“We had a free kick wide on the right in the first half that we took and hit the first defender. The ball came back and we over-hit the cross.
“It’s frustrating because we work so hard and to be fair to the players they work their socks off in training but are not producing it in games.
“You can not play great at times but put a good ball in the right area at the right time and if you’ve got people who can score goals, you can come away from games you haven’t done well, but winning 1-0.
“We never gave ourselves the opportunity to score goals.”