STEVE Ball’s Jammers suffered an unwanted hat-trick.

Maldon and Tiptree’s Ryman League division north match against Dereham Town on Saturday fell foul of the wet weather.

It followed hot-on-the-heels of the postponements the previous Saturday and Monday of their games against leaders AFC Sudbury and Thamesmead Town respectively.

New manager Ball’s only competitive game in charge of the Jammers so far was their 2-1 victory over Heybridge Swifts on January 2.

Ball said: “It’s massively frustrating that we have lost these games to the weather.

“It was good to ease in with some training sessions.

“However, to lose Saturday’s game was particularly disappointing.

“We have an issue with the pitch, in that we have the bank that the water drains down from and has collected.

“At the end of the day we have played more games than some of the teams around us and played about the same as some others.

“So at the moment I am not massively worried about any fixture backlogs.”

The Jammers played a friendly against Southend Manor on Tuesday night, winning 4-0.

Ball said: “We arranged the friendly just to get some gametime into the legs.

“We were worried about the frost and maybe it might harden up during the day.

“But we needed to play, I would have played in trainers.

“Training is great but you need match fitness and I just wanted that game to be a bit of a lungbuster.”

This weekend, Maldon travel to take on Bury Town and Ball wants to get back to action.

He said: “They came down from the Ryman premier and I know that they are a big team.

“They are always hard to play at their place. We just need to do the best we can.

“The Heybridge game seems so far away at the moment. We have Stanway Rovers in the Tolleshunt D’Arcy Memorial Cup next Tuesday. We are going to treat it as a full fixture.

“With all the games we have lost we need to get game time out on the pitch.”