CHIPPENHAM Town manager Mark Collier felt the absence of his more experienced squad members cost his side a shot at beating Woking in National League South as they lost 2-0 to the promotion chasers on Saturday.

Jake Hyde netted the first for the Cards after 17 minutes before getting his second after a lightning-paced counter-attack just before the break.

Chippenham did have chances to make the hosts sweat in the second period – Nat Jarvis wasted a one-on-one chance late on – but the Bluebirds would ultimately leave Surrey empty-handed.

Collier expressed disappointment at the final outcome, but believed his young side should be proud of their efforts while a few more wise heads in the Bluebirds’ line-up could have help shape a different result.

Collier said: “If you’d have turned up at half-time then you might have thought ‘well there’s not much between these two in the league table’ and we can take confidence from that, but in our squad of 17 that we took to Woking, there were eight players under 23 years of age.

“When you go to one of the big clubs in front of a big crowd, you need your experienced players and we didn’t have that, so that’s possibly not helped our cause.

“However, the second-half performance was very pleasing, and we should take a lot of heart from that.”

After season-highlight results against Torquay United and Billericay Town, Chippenham were unable to repeat the trick against high-flying Woking.

Collier was happy with how his team raised their game against one of the favourites for promotion and was left feeling particularly encouraged with their second-half showing.

He said: “We’re obviously disappointed to lose the game, but we know we were going to come under a lot of pressure when you go to a big team in this division and especially one like Woking who expect to be in the National League Premier.

“We knew we’d be under the cosh early on and they’ve got a tremendous amount of size and physicality about them.

“In the second half, we knew we could be a bit more aggressive in our forward play and that’s how it panned out.

“We had more of the ball, created a few chances, but we just haven’t managed to take them, which is disappointing because our second-half performance was very good.”