The thoughts of the St Neots Town manager after his side’s Hinchingbrooke Cup final defeat by AFC Kempston Rovers

IT certainly looked first half like it was one game too far for us and I don’t know what was in the lads’ heads.

Whether it was tiredness or whether we just thought we only had to turn up to beat them, we didn’t look interested.

We looked legless, effortless and lacking inspiration - whatever you want to call it.

At half time we got stuck into them and they worked a lot harder second half and I think, had we got a goal, there was only one team going to win it from there.

But there were countless opportunities that we didn’t take, their goalkeeper had a great game and, in fairness to how hard they worked in both halves, Kempston probably deserved their luck in the end and sometimes you get that in football.

It would have been nice had we been able to win it and, when you lose a game, you want to get the next game coming along quickly to get it out of your system.

But we haven’t got another game, so that’ll hurt now for a couple of days and once we’ve got it out of our heads, we’ll realise what we’ve achieved this year has been phenomenal and we’ll soon forget about that.

The players will have a rest up and a break now for about seven weeks until the end of June - and then we’ll come back fresh and excited about our next adventure.

I presume it’s going to be the Southern League Division One Central that we go into, as they’ve phoned us to come down and have a look at the facilities and I’ll be surprised if it’s not.

The league above will be quite a physical league, but then so is the UCL and there aren’t many teams that pass the ball around in the UCL.

It won’t be too dissimilar, but the teams will probably be a little bit more organised and one or two teams will have a bit more quality.

But our quality was far and above the UCL and, hopefully, we’ll be a match for anybody next season.