WITHAM Cricket Club captain Jake Wakelin admitted his team had a day to forget as they lost ground on the frontrunners in the race for the Marshall Hatchick Two Counties Championship division one title.

Third-placed Witham have been looking to keep pace with top two Mildenhall and Wivenhoe, but a suffered an off-day as they were beaten by five-wickets at Mistley.

Wakelin led from the front as he top-scored with 64 in Witham's 263 for six and the skipper said he and his team-mates felt that was a competitive score at the game's halfway point.

However, they hadn't bargained on a display of batting from the Swans' overseas star, Jarryd Walsh, that saw the South African hit a match-winning 130 to lead the hosts to victory.

It was an impressive performance that stood out on the day, but Wakelin felt it was more his own team's shortcomings that allowed Mistley to record their victory.

"It was a disappointing day to be honest," said Wakelin.

"We thought 260-odd wasn't a bad score and we felt it was about par at the halfway stage.

"Ideally we could have got more, but we lost three quick wickets in the middle of our innings and that didn't help.

"Going from 100 for one to 110 for four in four or five overs was not ideal, but Leroy (Facey) and Simon Jones stuck to it and kept their wickets intact and then Richard Green came in and blasted 40 late on to get us up to an average score.

"But it's a small ground at Mistley and we just couldn't put enough pressure on.

"We dropped chances and our ground fielding was poor.

"Most notably, we had a chance to get Jarryd Walsh early on and not taking that cost us, but to be honest, our bowling just wasn't good enough.

"It was a pretty bad day all round.

"You could say that had they not had Jarryd Walsh in their side then they would have won, but they did have him and we just didn't perform, which was disappointing for us."