Micky Mellon rued more missed chances after being held to a draw by Altrincham.

Latics led 1-0 at the break at the J Davidson Stadium thanks to James Norwood's first goal of the season, in only his second game since recovering from a calf injury that wrote off his pre-season.

Regan Linney equalised in the 68th  minute, after Mike Fondop had missed a chance to benefit from good work by fellow substitute Callum Dolan and mark their introduction from the bench with an immediate goal.

Fondop missed a further two chances, the last a one-on-one with Ethan Ross that the keeper saved.

There were flashbacks to a fortnight ago at Aldershot, where Latics were punished for missed opportunities, albeit more severely on that occasion.

"We've been guilty of that for a couple of weeks now," said Mellon of the misses.

"We're not sort of scratching around and trying to convince people that they're chances, they're not half chances.

"You don't get chances like that and don't score. It's difficult.

"If you're going to win games of football you can't miss chances like that. We were guilty of that in pre-season as well and it's come into the season where you can pinpoint opportunities where you think 'you've got to slot that in'.

"The teams that are successful take those chances, they slot them and say 'see you later', get the points and get out of here. But we never did it and it is frustrating because this is a tough place to come and Altrincham are a good side and we quite easily could have come away with three points rather than one, so it's frustrating.

"But the goal we gave away was disappointing. It was a free kick and it was a crap ball in and you just expect us to defend that better. 

"How it's got by us I don't know.

"The second half was turning into us being very solid and getting a good, solid away performance, without passing it as much as I'd like to, but it was pretty solid and we weren't really looking in any kind of real danger. We just needed to be a bit better with the ball at times.

"Off the ball, defensively we were pretty solid all over the pitch and the subs that came on did well for us in order to do that and worked really hard."