YORK City boss Gary Mills slammed Simon Heslop for making the “ridiculous challenge” that he felt helped FC United of Manchester secure a 2-0 win at Bootham Crescent.

Heslop was sent off for a second bookable offence just past the hour for an ugly lunge at visiting midfielder Nathan Lowe.

Sub Tom Greaves and Jason Gilchrist went on to hit the target for the Lancashire part-timers and Mills seethed: “It was a ridiculous challenge from him and made things difficult for us.

"He’s not a young player. He’s experienced and knows, if you’re on a yellow, you can’t breathe on anybody these days, so I can’t understand why he went in like that.

"With 11 players, I don’t think we would have lost the game. We might not have won it, because we were struggling to break them down, but we still had unbelievable chances with ten men to take the lead. We didn’t take them and that came back to bites us.”

Jon Parkin, Amari Morgan-Smith and Michael Rankine were all guilty of wastefulness with Mills insisting the defeat must serve as a watershed moment in the campaign, adding: “By the end, we were desperately looking to get a goal back and it didn’t look good at times.

“But it wasn’t good enough overall either. People will be talking about how disgusted they were by the performance over their cups of tea or pints and I know we have to be better than that.

“It was poor and it hurt us. But this – our seventh game – has to be a trigger so we can say, at the end of the season, that everything started from this match.”

Mills could also seek permission to strengthen his ranks with Adriano Moke sidelined for up to two months with a pulled thigh muscle, Louis Almond missing against FC United of Manchester because of bruised ribs and Heslop due to serve his suspension at Spennymoor next Tuesday.

“We haven’t got a big squad and that’s three players who would normally be in our starting XI,” Mills pointed out. “We’ll look at whether we need to bring anybody in and, if that’s the case, then ask if it’s possible.

“But, if not, we’ve got a squad that has to deal with who we are and what we’re about.”

The loss was City’s second at home this term and his side have now lost more matches than they have won at Bootham Crescent in 2017.

On the difficulties at their North Yorkshire base, Mills admitted: “Things aren’t right, because we nearly ended up drawing with Nuneaton as well and you have to learn from every game.”