Whilst Dagenham were worthy winners, we were very much worthy losers and aside from a bright opening couple of minutes to the game, and a late token effort, we never looked like doing anything to prevent Daggers' keeper spending more time in exchanges with the Dale fans than he was with the Dale players.

Buoyed on by back to back wins, the start to the season which many had deemed to be not as good as last year was threatening to see us hit the leading pack already as we chased three successive league victories for the first time since April. The only change to the team was the introduction of Scott Wiseman in for the injured Simon Ramsden.

Things started well enough. After a little last minute warm up between the players coming out for the game and kick off starting, we actually started the game as well as we have any game all season. We looked up for it and had the in form Dagenham on the back foot straight away.

And that lasted about three minutes.

And from then on, we were out fought, out battled, out thought ...... in fact, add as many outs as you can think of because we were second best at everything. Praise must go to Dagenham, and indeed they'd probably have received more had they been a more established name side, but they played with an urgency and a level of pace that was sadly absent from our own troops in black and blue.

The warning signs were there early on. The D&R right back found himself with a glorious chance two yards out but all he succeeded in doing was proving why he was a defender and not a forward, as the ball spooned well over the bar from a well worked corner.

But we didn't have to wait too long for the visitors to take the lead. The move all started following a challenge on the Main Stand side of the pitch, in which Nathan Stanton reacted by shoving the Daggers left winger who graciously accepted the shove with word or reaction. He knew his place.

Unfortunately, it would appear that this little incident brought down the red mist on Stanton for within seconds he went charging forward out of position chasing a lost cause and in his absence, D&R took the lead.

They broke centrally, pushed it out wide, and put in a low cross leaving leading scorer Benson the simplest of tap ins before celebrating out in front of our main stand, no doubt in response to some previous comment, and for the fourth time in our five home games this season, the opposition had the lead.

The nearest we came to threatening at the end came in the closing stages of the half, when Alfie forced a fine save out of Tony Roberts in the Dagenham end when he let fly from around twenty yards.

But worry not, we're a second half side and experience has shown that we've come back from such a position many times over the past twelve months, and perhaps we even need the opposition to hold a half time lead just to kick start us. Or maybe we just believed that too much, and assumed that the fight back would automatically follow. It didn't.

The second half was probably as frustrating as anything you've seen from Dale in quite a long time. We had plenty of ball, and tried to do things with it, but it just didn't happen. We could list all the things that we didn't do right, but with a game on Tuesday we don't really have the time.

If I had to pinpoint one thing that we're not doing, it's we're not making enough gambles. We are reacting to things which happen during the game, rather than making them happen ourselves, and as such we look ordinary. Even switching to a 4-3-3 formation had no impact at all on our fortunes. If anything, it frustrated us even further.

Time crept on, and thoughts from how we'd get into a winning position transformed to how we'd sneak a point from this game. It just wasn't happening. There's been many games I've seen at Spotland that you just knew were over long before the final whistle, and thankfully there's been precious few of these under Keith Hill, but today was certainly one of those. Everything about the second half said a Dale defeat.

The frustration became evident off the field, as the grumblings were understandably getting louder as the game wore on. Moves would break down over and over before they got anywhere close to the "having a shot" stage.

No such fears for Dagenham. They nearly added to their lead when they had a shot cannon off the crossbar, and they looked increasingly comfortable the more and more time ran out.

The same could not be said for us, and Dagnall's introduction merely highlighted the current crisis of confidence he is going through right now, with one chance that he opted to pass rather than shoot greeted by howls from behind the goal.

The second goal came with around twenty minutes to go, and in many ways it was very similar to their first. A cross from the left hand side was not dealt with at all, and even though Russell produced a great save from Benson's effort, the oddly haired Ritchie was left with nothing more than a tap in to finish it and us off.

It was going through the motions from that point on, and the introduction of Thompson only proved that there's pretty much nothing that he can do to warrant any sort of praise in certain quarters, as in twelve minutes he produced our best pass and our three best crosses of the entire game without anything close to a handclap.

Thompson's cameo at least provided something that had been absent previously, and it led to what was arguably our only effort on goal in the second half as a Buckley effort got cleared off the line, but even a consolation goal would have been harsh on the visitors who had been a class above us all afternoon.

So the defeat that seemed inevitable since around 3:07 came about and the four minutes of injury time had simply prolonged the agony far longer than anyone wanted it to.

Depressing, damp, dreadful, dire, dismal, dispriting and about five hundred other words beginning with D that we can't be bothered to reach for a thesaurus to find out. Not a good day at the office.