Eastbourne Borough boss Garry Wilson insists fixture congestion cost his side a play-off spot.

Borough's promotion dreams were ended on the last day of the regular season.

They needed a victory over Braintree Town, in their fourth game in eight days, and either Newport County or Bishop's Stortford not to win.

Newport slipped to a 2-1 defeat at home to Cambridge City but Borough went down 2-1 at Priory Lane and Wilson reckons the busy schedule wrecked their dream of grabbing a Nationwide Conference place.

Wilson said: "The amount of games in such a short space of team was ridiculous. I know some of the congestion was caused by postponements because of our pitch but not all of it. We had a lot of away games in there. For some reason all these games came in the last week of the season. I don't know why they (the league) did it.

"It has cost us. I think if those games had been stretched out a little more we could have been in there."

Borough secured their third victory in five days against Bognor last Thursday but it left them facing Town 41 hours later with a decimated squad. They were without their entire left side, with Adam Wilde, Neil Jenkins, Matt Crabb and Jay Lovett all out.

Scott Ramsay was only fit enough for a place on the bench and goalkeeper Lee Hook and Matt Smart played with strappings to protect injuries.

The situation got worse during the match as Pat Harding broke a rib, Dominic Douglas suffered concussion and Darren Baker pulled a hamstring.

Allan Tait had given Borough hope of pulling off an unlikely victory when he cancelled out a disputed penalty, converted by Bradley Quinton, but Billy Burgess bundled home the winner after the interval.

Wilson added: "It turned out a difficult day against Braintree. The game against Bognor killed us and the players were on their last legs.

"We were running on empty and running out of players for our most important game of the season. We even had to throw on two under-18 players who had never even touched this level of football (Josh Flaherty and Ryan Hirooka).

"If we had made it through to the play-off semi-finals on Wednesday we would have struggled to get a team out."