WORCESTER City manager Carl Heeley hit out at referee Martin Dexter after his side were beaten 1-0 by Halifax.

Heeley was angered by Dexter’s decision not to award the hosts a free-kick in the build-up to Halifax’s winner at St George’s Lane.

The City boss felt Greg Mills had been fouled prior to the visitors being given a free-kick of their own, from which Gareth Seddon headed home.

“I am bitterly disappointed,” Heeley said. “I’m disappointed that the referee has decided the outcome of the game and not the two sets of 11 players, which is not good enough.

“Greg cut in between the two players and was bursting into space, we were on the attack and their boy cynically pulled him down. It should have been a free-kick and a booking and he (the referee) didn’t given it.

“He tried to convince me it’s all about angles, but I don’t care which angle you’re looking at or wherever you’re standing in the ground, that was a foul and a booking.

"It’s incredibly frustrating when I’m not talking about a moment of brilliance, I’m talking about a moment of incompetence for want of a better phrase.”

Heeley was also critical of his team’s inability to score for the second time in three home matches.

He said: “(Gareth) Seddon is a good striker and you'd expect him to score there, but I expect my strikers to score as well.

“We had two glorious chances in the first-half and failed to score so that was frustrating because we should have been a couple of goals up.

“In a game of few chances, we’ve got to take ours as well but when it’s tight like that you don’t want to get beaten and we were undone by a poor refereeing decision.”

The Worcester manager added: “I thought we started quite well and I feel a bit sorry for the boys because they worked ever so hard — there wasn’t much quality from either side, we cancelled each other out.

"Being a little bit critical, we gave a player a job to be in the near post area and he wasn't therefor their goal.

“If he had been, he’d have prevented the goal but, that said, I felt defensively that was our only lapse and we got punished for it.”

Heeley, however, had praise for new signing Kyle Patterson, who made his full debut up front with Mike Symons.

“I think we saw the benefit of giving him time on the pitch, I thought his work-rate was superb and at times his positions warranted a better final ball and it didn’t come,” Heeley said.

“That was a bit strange for us because you’d like to think at some point in the game we would thread a good ball through and we struggled.”