DISAPPOINTED captain Chris Berry slammed his side's batting performance as Radcliffe slumped to a surprise two-wicket defeat against Middleton, and is demanding a marked improvement against Heyside this weekend.

The Championship side fell to third place in the Central Lancashire League following their second defeat of the season, and the skipper was disappointed with his wasteful batting order.

"I'm not best pleased with the result and the way we performed against Middleton, particularly with the bat," said Berry.

"We let ourselves down. To only get 154 on a good track was poor.

"Right the way down the order we just threw our wickets away and we shouldn't be doing that. We still had nine overs to go when they bowled us all out.

"We made bad decisions and picked the wrong balls to smack."

Despite the loss, the Homer Street men did have more success with the ball, but Berry himself was left to rue a number of missed catches.

"We gave it a good try with the bowling but unfortunately we messed up on the catching.

"With Middleton needing 30 runs we had them eight down but I dropped a simple catch and that really gave them the momentum to go on and win it.

"We sold ourselves short. We didn't perform on the day. Our fielding wasn't the best. We looked a bit lacklustre and Middleton deserved to win it."

Top scorer Saif Ur Rehman fell one short of a half century as Radcliffe struggled to make any impact with the bat.

With openers Usman Malik, Rashid Riaz and professional Raheel Majeed all dismissed cheaply for nine, four and 13 respectively, it was left to sixth batsman Rehman to steady the innings with 49.

He was well supported by Rizwan Javed who added 29 but the Homer Street men were all out for 154.

Despite the best efforts of Ur Rehman, who took 4-44 including five maidens, and Majeed who took 4-29, Zain Tahir led the Middleton reply with an unbeaten 63.

Grant Jones also helped himself to 39 as the fifth-placed visitors convincingly chased down the target.

Despite the disappointing display, Berry reserved praise for star batsman and opening bowler Ur Rehman.

"Saif did a great job for us. I can't praise him enough. He had a really good day with the bat got four wickets and bowled 18 overs.

"He needed some runs and he went out there and did well to rebuild the innings because at one stage it looked like we wouldn't get to 100."

Radcliffe will be without Martin Coates when they travel to fourth-placed Heyside on Saturday as they look to get their title ambitions back on track before hosting Kate Cross' Heywood in the Wood Cup on Sunday.

"If we want to be challenging with Crompton for the league then we need to be winning games against teams like Middleton," he said.

"Player for player they shouldn't have got anywhere near us; they shouldn't have even bowled us out.

"We have already beaten Heyside this season so I expect nothing less than a win to get us back to winning ways and put our title challenge back on track."