WREXHAM midfielder Matt Crowell was desperately disappointed that a mistake cost the Dragons the chance of extending their unbeaten run to six matches, following Northampton Town's 1-0 victory at the Racecourse.

The Wales under-21 international admitted that the Cobblers were among the strongest teams in the division but reckoned that Wrexham didn't really deserve to go down to a fourth home defeat of the season.

"To be fair they were the better side for 25 minutes and knocked the ball round well," said Crowell afterwards.

"But eventually we got back into it for 15 to 20 minutes and it was the same at the beginning of the second half. They didn't really look like scoring because we kept the ball a bit better and the game seemed to be heading for a draw.

"Then we made a costly error, which was very disappointing, but the gaffer said at the end that we are not going to come across many better teams in our league.

"So we have to try and take positives from the game and at least we got back into the game and kept a lot of the ball in the second half and we'll have to hope we learn from the error."

Wrexham manager Denis Smith said the culprits for Northampton's goal, defender Danny Williams and goalkeeper Mike Ingham, had accepted the blame in the dressing room.

"The game has been decided on a bad mistake, which was just a lump down the middle at a time we'd got them pressed back," he said.

"I thought in the first 20 minutes you could see why they are doing something in the league but after that I felt we got the measure of them and we started to get on top in the second half.

"But then we got done by a schoolboy error and you can't allow goals to be scored like that at any level.

"It's cost us because we looked strong defensively until then, but either Danny's got to deal with it or the keeper's got to come.

"But they don't make mistakes deliberately, they held their hands up and hopefully they'll learn from it.

"Mike made some good saves after that, but obviously the game had changed and we'd had to come out and chase it. On the whole 0-0 would have possibly been the right result against a very good side."

The Racecourse boss claimed his young and relatively inexperienced line-up had acquitted themselves well against a side gunning for automatic promotion.

"We can't expect miracles from these lads, but what we proved today was that we deserve to be uop there with the top teams," he added

"We've had an extremely good month with these young players playing the way we have and today we've matched a team who will go up automatically.

"No one looks at the squad or at the opposition because they expect us to play like Brazil every week, I would love to do it but unfortunately I've got to make the best of what we've got and I think we do that.

"Sometimes people have got to take off the blinkers and look at the real world."