JODY Brown is finding it harder than he thought to attract experienced players to Heybridge Swifts.

The Scraley Road club find themselves bottom of the Ryman League division north table after their 1-0 defeat at Haringey Borough on Saturday.

Brown, who took over from former boss Cliff Akurang in October, said: “I have no excuses for the Haringey result.

“It was a tight game and we just fell on the wrong side of it.

“It was evident that we were a young team and in tight games like that it’s fine margins that can win you or lose you the game.

“If we had a few more experienced heads then it would be better.

“But you can take it both ways – the young players will learn from these experiences and be better equipped in the long term.

“It means we will have some good players at the club in a couple of seasons.

“But on the other hand we need points now and a sprinkling of experience would go a long way to securing that.”

And that is where Brown is finding it problematic in luring those kind of players to Heybridge.

He said: “When I first came back to the club I thought I had three or four experienced players that had all but agreed terms but unfortunately they fell through. It has proved harder than I thought to recruit players.

“It is difficult to recruit with the position the club is in.

“The people we want are playing for other clubs and are not free agents.

“It’s not just a case of saying come and play for me.

“I don’t mean that as a big headed thing to say.

“But these are players who have played for me before and I need to be able to offer them something.

“At the moment we can’t pay over the odds to attract players to the club and we can’t tempt players with a promotion push.

“I am working around the clock at the moment to find players that I might not know about. I am on the phone asking about players, seeing if there any local ones that can come and help us out and I am going to watch matches.

“If I can bring in a little more experience then it will bring our youngsters on.”

Looking back on the Haringey game, Brown saw seeds of hope for his side.

He said: “We played alright on Saturday.

“I think in our last three games, against Dereham, Harlow and Haringey, we gave a decent account of ourselves.

“If we could have scored early on then I think that we could have got points from those games.

“But that is our problem at the moment – scoring goals.”