A fuming Chris Wilder felt his Oxford United side got what they deserved after describing Saturday’s 2-1 home defeat against Morecambe as the “worst performance of the season.”

Scott Rendell immediately cancelled out Craig Curran’s early opener, but the U’s went on to produce a listless display.

Stewart Drummond headed Morecambe’s winner on 74 minutes as United crashed to only their second home defeat since November.

Wilder was livid with his players, who had impressed with wholehearted displays in recent weeks.

He said: “I’m angry with the performance that we’ve chucked out.

“I’ve got to say I’ve not seen many of those in my time here, whether we can blame it on lack of energy or lack of spark – I think maybe that was the case because we looked dead on our feet.

“But that’s no excuse, you’ve got to get yourself up. When games are like this you have to really dig something out to get a result.

“You could see there was no spark after about two seconds when we gave the ball away at the kick-off.

“It was a poor first goal, we got ourselves back into it and missed a couple of chances, but we only passed the ball three times all afternoon and twice we should’ve scored.

“When we got it forward the two boys didn’t get hold of it at all, I thought the substitutes made no impact at all on the game and didn’t give us a spark.

“I don’t think anybody can come out of that with any credit whatsoever, apart from maybe the goalkeeper (Ryan Clarke) with the save he had to make.

“It really is disappointing and a bad time to produce the worst performance of the season.”

Even a blast from the coaching staff during the interval did nothing to inspire the U’s players, who may be forced to watch the game before training today.

Wilder felt the result killed off any chance of claiming an automatic promotion place in npower League Two and is now concerned with holding on to their position in the play-offs.

He said: “We said at half-time we look like a team that looks happy just to nestle in the play-offs, instead of a team that really did have serious ambitions about getting into the top three. That’s definitely gone now and we have a serious battle on our hands to get into the play-offs.”