Seb Rodger insisted he’d go back to the drawing board after a disappointing Commonwealth Games debut in Glasgow.

Rodger, from Eastbourne, was at a loss to explain his lacklustre performance in the 400m hurdles heat at Hampden Park.

He was never in contention for the qualifying slots, fading to finish fourth in a pedestrian time of 50.71 seconds that was over a second slower than his season’s best.

Rodger’s preparations were disrupted when his car was hit by a van last month. The European under-23 silver medallist suffered whiplash injuries plus a fractured index finger and admitted the incident knocked his confidence.

“I’m not sure what’s going on and I’m having a bit of a nightmare on the track at the moment,” he said.

“I’m not performing how I should be and that was awful to be honest. The car crash did hit me pretty bad. It set me back a couple of weeks of training at a really critical time of the season.

“As soon as I got a bit of a rhythm in racing I had that incident and I haven’t really been able to get that back since.

“I got a bit of whiplash and still have broken fingers but it was more about taking time off training. I went straight into trials, which wasn’t what I needed. It’s just unfortunate really.”

Rodger made his major event debut at last year’s World Championships in Moscow and he insists he is starting to feel at home on the big stage.

However, he has not been named in the British team for next month’s European Championships in Zurich, meaning his season is likely to end in Glasgow. He said: “I don’t know where to go from here.”

Commonwealth Games England (CGE) leads and manages the participation of the Team England at the Commonwealth Games and Commonwealth Youth Games. We work with sports, Sponsors and Sport England to support the development of athletes and their sports, and to achieve success at Games-time.