Macclesfield’s relegation was confirmed on Saturday, leaving Giles Heagerty disappointed once again after his team came away from a game empty-handed after being in a position to push on and secure a result.

The Blues went in at half-time level with Loughborough Students and the momentum very much in their favour.

But after being stopped just short of the line and losing players from key positions there was a massive momentum shift which resulted in them slipping 20 points behind before a late Matt King consolation score.

“Loughborough are a very good side, particularly if you’re going to give them space to run around,” said the Blues' head coach. “It’s frustrating when you talk and work on how to deal with certain things but when it translates into the game we struggle to do it.

“The key point was just after half-time, if we could have gone over it would have made a hell of a difference. But instead we lost Marshall Gadd and Sam James in the same passage of play, and that really sucked the momentum out of us.”

Heagerty felt it took his team too long to recover from the changes but that was not the only thing that let his side down.

Giles Heagerty

Errors and lapses in concentration in key areas led to the Students retaining possession from the Blues’ scoring opportunities.

“It took us 12 minutes to recover from the changes we had to make through the injuries and by that stage we had conceded 10 points,” added Heagerty. “It wasn’t the only thing that hurt us though.

“We missed a lift in the line-out in a great area of the field, it’s little things like that really hurt you in the course of 80 minutes.”

Man-of-the-match and England Under-20 World Cup winner, Henry Taylor was key in taking apart the Blues defence, and despite being impressed with Taylor’s display, Heagerty felt his team should have coped better.

“He’s a World Cup winner. We’ve pandered to him, look at what he’s done to us. But we should have dealt with him better,” he added.

The Blues travel to face Old Albanians this week, and Heagerty expects his team to up their game for the final run-in.

“They like to sling it around but they’re very well drilled up front like every team in national one. We’ve got some bruised bodies,” he said.

“There are five games to go so we need to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and really concentrate on putting in five big performances.”