COLCHESTER United manager John Ward praised his team’s performance following their 1-0 defeat at Tranmere this afternoon.

The U’s have now lost their four games and are just nine points off the bottom four with nine games to play.

Enoch Showunmi got between debutant Tommy Smith and left-back Ben Coker to score Tranmere’s winner after 53 minutes.

Colchester did rally after that set-back and both Kayode Odejayi and Andy Bond saw headers cleared off the line.

“I thought the effort and performance warranted more than that,” said Ward.

“I’m not going to say I’m massively disappointed because we tried to be positive.

“We’ve had a couple of chances cleared off the line in the second half – we’re just waiting for one to drop for us.

“Certainly the application of the team today was real first class and I thought they had a real good go at it.

“I’ll stand up and defend this team for the way they’ve gone about their job today, we’ve just not had the break and people who play sport will recognise that sometimes you just need something to go your way.

“They know that I’ll ball them out when it’s not right, like I did at Dagenham, and they know that I’ll defend them when I need to. They’ve done everything they can to get something from the game. It just hasn’t gone our way.”

He continued: “If we keep working like that then it will turn our way. At the moment we are going through a period we have to weather.

“It’s my job now to impress that on the team because there will be a lot of people saying we’re not very good, and we’re not doing this and we’re not doing that.

“You (the media) have seen the team today and if you were to say they haven’t tried their best in terms of their work rate then I’d be surprised.

“If this team puts in a similar performance on Tuesday (home against Oldham) then they will have a good chance of winning.”

He continued: “Everyone will get carried away and say it’s four defeats and you can’t score a goal, they’ll talk about all the negatives and all the disappointments, but my job is to work on what are good at and what we can be good at.”

– Full report and reaction in Monday’s EADT.