TOP Wales performer Danny Gabbidon admitted he was disappointed at the racial abuse hurled towards him by local thugs last night, writes Peter Shuttleworth.

And Wales manager Mark Hughes has vowed to make an official complaint to UEFA about the sick insults during his side's 1-0 defeat against Serbia and Montenegro.

Gabbidon, striker Nathan Blake and then substitute Robert Earnshaw suffered the disgusting treatment and the Football Association of Wales will write to European football's governing body about the abuse as well as the taunting Under-21 keeper Jason Brown suffered the previous evening in Novi Sad.

But Panteg-born Gabbidon, Wales' man-of-the-match last night, declared: "I didn't hear a thing. I was just concentrating on the game so I didn't hear what they were saying, I didn't listen to the crowd once.

"However, it's just life. People are going to say things and you can't stop them but it is disappointing if they were saying things like that.

"Sticks and stones will break my bones, names won't hurt me."

Gabbidon, meanwhile, insists he and his top-of-the-table Welsh colleagues should put last night's heart-break behind them and focus on the next fixture - a Milan showdown with the second-placed Italians.

"We are still on top of Group Nine so we can't be too disappointed," said the 24-year-old Cardiff City centre-back. "We've got to brush ourselves off and forget this result. We must just get on with it. If we mope about losing out here, we could face problems in the next game.

"We'll go into the Italy game thinking we're going to win, we've got to keep going. We must remember we're still on top and the team to catch."

Gabbidon was outstanding in winning his fifth cap but the shy defender, raised in the Southfields area of Cwmbran, typically refused to take all the praise.

"All of us across the back played well," he said. "We were solid. Their strikers didn't really create anything and we kept them quiet. We felt quite confident and it was unlucky they scored like they did.

"We do feel a little hard done by because we played decent football - but so did they. However, they never looked like scoring apart from a set-piece which eventually did us.

"As soon as they scored we had to chase the game and we had a few chance.

"It's just a pity we didn't create before we went behind. We could have gone back into it.

"We showed we could open them up but unfortunately the ball, for whatever reason, didn't go in the back of the net."