Nikki Bull admitted his side were ‘not good enough by a long stretch’ in Saturday’s humiliating home defeat to Concord Rangers.

The Essex visitors had won just one of their opening 13 Vanarama National League South matches but ran out comfortable 5-1 victors, inspired by Steve Cawley’s
hat-trick.

Both sides finished the match with 10 men – Gate skipper Luke Moore the first to go for an alleged elbow after only 22 minutes.

The Blues were already 1-0 down at the time but Bull said the red card had little bearing on the final outcome.

The Gate boss, whose side slipped two places to 16th after the defeat, said: “It never should have been a red card but these decisions get made and I don’t want to make the sending-off an issue because we did not lose because of it.

“Every time they went forward I thought they were going to score. It was not good enough by a long stretch. The manner of the goals was appalling and the second one in particular knocked the stuffing out of us.”

Bull himself was ruled out of the game due to a back injury sustained in the midweek FA Cup defeat to Harrow and with regular first choice Lewis Ward sidelined by a leg injury, he had to play teenager Jordan Carey.

The former Brentford youth keeper trained with the Blues pre-season and has most recently been playing for Cray Valley in the Southern Counties East League.

Bull said: “Lewis called me Thursday afternoon saying that he could not play and we thought we had lined up Tom Hadler to come in from Gillingham for a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, on Friday afternoon, I got a call saying that could not happen because they had injury concerns.”