BILLERICAY chairman Steve Kent says their match at home to Lowestoft was called off at the 11th hour because the visitors put pressure on the referee.

The game had already been given the green light by the match official shortly before 3pm, but with less than an hour to go until kick-off – and after the Trawler Boys had travelled to Essex from Suffolk -– he concluded the pitch had deteriorated enough to postpone the Ryman Premier fixture.

Kent said in his blog yesterday morning on the club website that the ref’s U-turn came after a long conversation with the Lowestoft manager, who, he said, had filmed people jumping in a section of the New Lodge pitch where he had concerns about surface water.

Kent wrote: “As the ref left the pitch he said to the waiting people ‘The pitch was worse than it had been four hours earlier, it must be the dew.’ When I asked him in the boardroom he said ‘the pitch was worse than earlier and all I can think of is the water must have risen.’ “A little later when I was speaking to our manager (Craig Edwards), he told me the Lowestoft manager had put considerable pressure on the referee. The Lowestoft manager told Craig that he showed the referee his film and said to the ref ‘Ref, so long as you know you will be accountable should any player get injured tonight’.”

Kent said he felt the pitch was in as good a condition as it had been for their FA Trophy game against St Albans a week earlier.

Town’s chairman concluded: “Calling games off for muddy pitches is baffling to me. The line given is ‘it's dangerous’, but I’m sure there are many, many more injuries caused by a hard pitches and long grass than there are on a soft pitch.

“I can’t think of a single injury in my 10 years at Billericay caused by playing in the mud. I can, however, remember a lot of serious injuries caused by long grass and hard pitches. A muddy pitch may look awful compared to a hard, well grassed pitch, but does that make it more dangerous?”

The postponement meant that Lowestoft, who are jointly managed by Ady Gallagher and Mick Chapman, had a wasted 200-mile round trip.

But Lowestoft secretary Terry Lynes said his sympathies were with the referee in making a difficult decision.

Lynes said: “Players from both sides had gone out there and our two managers had, and then Craig Edwards turned up, and I can’t honestly say whether he went out there or not.

“It was not just a case of us putting pressure (on the ref). From our point of view we had made a lot of effort to get there and the last thing we wanted to do was to turn around and go home again.

“It was just purely the fact that players from both sides and our managers thought the pitch was dangerous.”