HURTING Weymouth manager Bobby Wilkinson admitted he and his players deserved boos fired at them during and after the 5-1 thrashing by Bath City at the Bob Lucas Stadium.

Bath went 2-0 up by 31 minutes through Elliott Frear and Scott Wilson strikes before Ben Thomson’s stupendous volley from 30 yards cut the deficit.

However, all hope of a Weymouth comeback was extinguished two minutes later when Jordan Thomas skipped past two challenges and scored a third.

Frear volleyed a fourth before Calvin Brooks was sent off for two bookable offences and ex-Weymouth striker Cody Cooke completed the rout with a trademark close-range header on 90 minutes.

READ MORE: Weymouth 1-5 Bath City - report

The result provoked boos from the stands and terraces, leading Wilkinson to give a very honest assessment of the display.

He told Echosport: “The performance is nothing to do with money, nothing to do with top versus near the bottom.

“Man for man, stand up and get counted. Sometimes you’ve got to go to battle and win a war.

“I’m not going to here and defend that. It was a team that outplayed us, outran us and outworked us. It breaks my heart saying that. That one will hurt.

“I’ll have to dust myself down as a manager and go again. I’ve been in worse situations. This time last year I got booed, I got told we were definitely going down.

“Then, we stayed up. I’ll be judged now, no problems. I’ll bounce back and we’ll go again.”

Asked how confident he is of reviving Weymouth’s fortunes after the defeat, Wilkinson said: “We’re not confident, we have to.

“We had a brilliant defensive record until (yesterday) and then we folded. But, you don’t start panicking.

“It’s a bad day at the office but it’s the manner of the performance.”

On the boos, Wilkinson said: “It doesn’t affect me at all. The players deserved to be booed, I deserved to be booed.

“That just brushes off me because I’ve got a job to do. If you can’t handle a few boos and people criticising, you shouldn’t be in the job.

“Guess what, every single person has a right to say what they want. I will come under a load of pressure, I’ll go to sleep, get up and keep working.”

Wilkinson also offered his apologies to the majority of the 742-strong crowd in Weymouth’s favour.

He said: “Collectively as a group, we take full responsibility for that. Man for man they won their individual battles, they beat us up and it was men against boys at times.

“There’s nothing positive to say about that, we let everyone down and it doesn’t normally happen on my watch but it has.

“You have to judge a man when the chips are down. I’ve seen a lot of people really jump on it when you’re doing bad but I’m going to have to make sure we turn it around.”

He added: “I can’t even talk about (Thomson’s goal), we let the chairman down, the fans down and I’ve got no excuses.

“You have to go away and look at your own individual performances. I’ll take a lot more abuse on Twitter and people like to enjoy reading it.

“I see all that every week and I know who does it and who doesn’t. I’ve been in worse situations.

“But, no excuses and I apologise.”