Richard Kinsey compared Wallingford’s pitch to a ploughed field after his Marlow side went down to a 12-5 defeat on Saturday.

The head coach felt the surface was not fit for rugby and laid blame squarely at the referee’s door for allowing the match to go ahead. And to compound Kinsey’s frustration even further the hosts snatched victory with a converted try in the dying seconds of the contest.

He said: “I’ve never seen a rugby pitch in a worse state in all my life. We may as well have gone out to pick potatoes.

“I couldn’t have done a better job if I’d have gone out with a plough and ploughed the place. It was just a disgrace.

“You couldn’t play rugby on it. Within 30 seconds the ball weighed twice as much as it normally does because it was coated in mud and clay. They only had one match ball so you couldn’t clean the ball off at all.

“It wasn’t even a game, let alone a proper one. You couldn’t even play rugby. You’d have struggled to parachute on to it, let alone play rugby on it.”

Ted Hewett had handed the visitors the lead after 19 minutes with the first try of the game before Wallingford responded in kind 11 minutes later.

No further points were scored until the very last play of the match with Kinsey revealing that he felt sorry for the players for being made to play on such a pitch.

“In conditions where you couldn’t run with the ball because every time you tried to accelerate your feet went backwards rather than you going forward and with a referee who was just oblivious to the laws of the game it was just a stalemate,” he said.

“It was the worst game of rugby on the worst pitch I’ve ever seen in my life...and I’ve seen some awful rugby. I feel sorry for the guys because you train all week, you work hard, give your time up and then you turn up on a Saturday to be presented with a ploughed field.

“I felt very sorry for the players. With hindsight you’d probably have turned round to the referee and say ‘you know what, we’re not going to play on this’.”