YORK City’s “missed opportunity” in the Blue Square Premier play-off final will take Ben Purkiss “weeks to get over”, he admitted.

The right-back said a lack of composure had cost City deeply.

Purkiss, who admitted he had still not watched a replay of the club’s FA Trophy defeat to Stevenage at Wembley 12 months ago, said this defeat was “a lot, lot worse”.

He said: “It’s going to take weeks to get over this, for me. No one has said anything in there (the dressing room). What can you say?

“I can’t explain how down the squad and myself and everyone else is feeling.

“You do go back through – I thought I got in some good positions in the first half, when the delivery maybe wasn’t as good as it normally is.

“You can nit-pick and things like that and I am sure that the lads will be doing that. They will be looking back and thinking about a missed opportunity.”

He continued: “This is a lot, lot worse than the first (Wembley defeat). This is nine, ten months – a year’s hard work.

“In the first 20 minutes, we weren’t there.

“We didn’t show enough composure on the ball, we just kept giving it away and they were two sloppy goals.

“After that we played okay but it was too much to come back from in the end.”

It was Purkiss’ cross which was spilled by Oxford goalkeeper Ryan Clarke for City’s goal.

“I had half turned away and just glanced back to see what was going on and I saw it in the net,” he added.

“We had a couple of chances didn’t we? We knew the next goal was going to win the game and that we had to get it.

“There was belief there because, towards the end of the first half, we started getting on the ball, passing it a bit better, showing a bit of composure but I remember two really good chances in that second half and, again, we didn’t show the composure we needed to.

“It’s composure isn’t it? Composure on the big stage, and I don’t think we handled that particularly well.”