WAYNE Brown refused to criticise his Colchester United players after a 1-0 home loss to Port Vale this afternoon left them in the relegation mire.

Devante Rodney’s excellent first-half strike was enough to give Vale a vital victory at the JobServe Community Stadium, leaving the U’s seven points above the League Two bottom two, with ten games remaining.

Colchester have not scored in nearly eight hours of football and have won only one of their last 20 games, following the Vale defeat.

U’s interim first-team coach Brown said: “People that know me, people that have worked with me and people that know my character know that honesty is in me.

“It’s a big part of my values and you can’t hide away from it or dress it up any other way.

“We didn’t start the game as well as we should have done in the first half and we didn’t play as well as we do but listen, that’s going to happen – that’s football.

“One thing I won’t do is come out and criticise individuals and a collective group.

“Yes, we need to start the game better – that’s evident.

“But if that continued for the whole game, we’ve got a problem but it didn’t.

“We’ve made changes and we’ve been positive at half-time.

“We’ve brought two attacking players onto the pitch – an attack-minded right-back (Junior Tchamadeu) and Courtney (Senior) came on and we changed the system, which I thought was positive and it worked.

“We got a great reaction out of the lads and we’re going to score goals – we will score goals if you continue to do that but you’ve got to be positive.

“We have to take stock, look at the game for the 96 minutes or however long it was and take a lot of positives that came out of the second half.”

After a dire first-half display, Brown made changes at the break, bringing on Courtney Senior and Junior Tchamadeu and switching to a different formation.

It made a difference and the U’s created more chances but were unable to force an equaliser.

Brown said: “We need to turn up to games and the first half was disappointing, because we didn’t lay a finger on them.

“Too many first and second balls were lost and we played the game quite naively, in that we probably played to their strengths, which we’d talked about and identified.

“But I was happy with the second half and the response that the lads made and there were a lot of positives to come out of that.

“It was a disappointing outcome and we were obviously hoping for the three points – that was what we’d done our work to achieve but it wasn’t to be.

“If I’m honest, I was happy with the second-half display and I thought the lads showed a fantastic reaction.

“We dominated pretty much the whole of the second half, had territory in their half, created chance after chance and made the keeper work.

“We probably could have done a little bit more in that 12-yard area and 18-yard box.”