MARCHING on Colchester determined to win the battle Bury's fight ended in defeat at the hands of Caesar. For all their determination the Shakers just could not match his inspiration. After 89 minutes of disciplined work what did the damage was a Tony Rigby foul - which Stan Ternent afterwards described as "unnecessary."

That, together with the failure to mark danger man Gus Caesar from the resulting free kick, allowed the ex-Arsenal defender to send in a header that soared into the far corner from 14 yards out.

Colchester's breakthrough came as a climax to a 20-minute spell in which the home side posed their only serious danger to Bury.

Two good scoring chances were spurned by Rob Matthews and Mark Carter, and the recently deadly Carter later had another wonderful effort crash against the crossbar.

Gary Kelly, who had a superb game, came to the rescue with a fantastic fingertip save which clawed away Tony Adcock's bullet-like header.

And three minutes before Caesar's fateful strike he also produced an outstanding double save to deny Mark Kinsella.

Until then the Shakers looked the more likely to find the net in this often scrappy game.

But manager Stan Ternent saw the positive side of his teams performance. After the match he said: "We'll win more games than we'll lose if we carry on playing like that.

"When we were on a good run and people were saying nice things about us I always said there was a long way to go and I didn't expect us to go through the season without losing.

"Now we've got to pick ourselves up. We created chances, but where we have been sticking them away in previous games, we didn't take them this time."

But if the Shakers miss promotion by one point they will look back at this game against Colchester, and know it was the one that got away because it could have been such a different story.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.