Oxford United have been simply not good enough.

That was the verdict of assistant manager Mickey Lewis as their play-off hopes were dealt a major blow by Saturday’s 2-1 defeat at bottom club Stockport County.

It was United’s third defeat of the week, and leaves them in tenth place in npower League Two, five points behind Gillingham, who fill the bottom play-off spot.

“It’s not been good enough the last week,” Lewis said. “Not good enough at all.

“People talk about us playing great football and all this, but you’ve got to dig in and defend properly, and this week we haven’t done that.”

The match turned when U’s left back Anthony Tonkin was sent off midway through the second half for a second bookable defence, when they were leading 1-0.

They couldn’t hold on with ten men and fell to a Stockport winner in the fourth minute of stoppage time.

It meant the basement boys did the double over United having won 1-0 at the Kassam Stadium in September.

But Lewis defended the decision not to take Tonkin off when he was on a yellow card, even though the defender had also been given a final warning during the first half.

“He’s an experienced defender,” he said. “As a defender, you get booked sometimes.

“If you did that every game, you’d be taking a lot of people off the pitch, that’s the problem.

“It’s a silly sending-off for Tonks, he’s been booked – I thought unfairly – but then he got away with one after that as well, which was possibly just rewards because he shouldn’t have been booked in the first place.

“When you’re a defender and you’ve been booked, you can’t go diving in like he did.

“But I thought we were still comfortable. Obviously they were going to throw things at us, which you understand, they’re fighting for their lives, but they were poor goals again.

“At the moment we’re conceding some really bad goals, with some really bad individual errors.

“No matter what you do tactically, individual errors cost you goals.”

Lewis added: “The club is really positive, everything’s going forward, and the players have to realise that.

“If they want to stay a part of it, they have to defend better than they have done this week.”