BLUES boss Neil Young today rued his team’s missed chances in Saturday’s 2-1 defeat against Division One North League leaders Chorley.

Young was disappointed about several of his players failing to find the target after Chester had created a series of opportunities that should have earned the Blues a decisive interval lead in front of an impressive 3,092 crowd.

Rob Hopley headed Chester level 10 minutes before the break after Andrew Russell had put Chorley 1-0 up in the 32nd minute.

And Jack Dorney then converted a 61st minute penalty to condemn the Blues to their first league defeat of the season.

Young said: “Chorley’s goalkeeper had a storming performance, but if we had put our chances away we could quite easily have been four or five goals up by half-time.

“They scored from a miskicked free kick which hit one of our lads and one of their players put it away.

“To be fair to our lads we scored a good equaliser from a corner, but I know we could have scored a few more goals.

“Then we came out for the second half and stopped passing the ball. We didn’t get on the ball enough, and they won a penalty from an incident which George Horan insisted was outside the box.

“But I don’t think we did enough in the second half to win the game, although Chris Williams had a superb chance to score late on in the game – unfortunately he made the wrong decision.

“Our problem was that we seemed to want to launch the ball in the air instead of getting the ball down and passing it.

“We’ve got to be willing to get on the ball, otherwise we’ll get beat in games. There wasn’t enough people wanting to get on the ball.

“There wasn’t enough options when we did get the ball, although we did lose Andy Burgess who was still feeling the knock he picked up in pre-season.

“But the penalty decision seemed to knock the stuffing out of us because up until that point we had started to up the ante in the game and we created a couple of chances.

“I think Chorley only created two chances throughout the whole match, and one of those was at the end when we were trying to push on.

“Chorley did pass the ball around very well in the second half, but from my viewpoint I was disappointed that we failed to pass the ball around after the break and there wasn’t enough people in the midfield areas taking ownership of their roles.”

Young, who is now preparing his squad for tomorrow’s President’s Cup tie at Leek Town, revealed he was intending to rest Burgess and defender George Horan this week.

He said: “Goals change games, and if we had put two or three chances away in the first half against Chorley the game could have been so different.

“Their goalkeeper is paid to keep the ball out of his net and that’s what he did.

“We had got back into the game and I thought we were on top. I told the players not to dive into tackles, but then we gave away an absolutely stupid penalty which has ultimately cost us the game.

“We’ve lost three points, but it’s only three points and we can’t get carried away with the result because if we win our game in hand over Chorley we’re only three points behind them.

“We can’t suddenly get upset about one result because the lads have been playing really well.

“When Andy Burgess went off with an injury we probably lost a little bit of our impetus. We took a gamble on starting him because of the quality he brings to the side, but he’s still struggling with an injury so we’ll give him a rest this week and see how we go.

“George Horan will also be rested because he’s been carrying an ankle injury for some time.”