Drey Wright has vowed to return stronger for Colchester United’s final run-in ahead of his hernia surgery today.

The skilful winger made his first start of 2017 for the U’s in their 3-0 defeat at Exeter City, which ended their nine-match unbeaten run.

But Wright, who has been suffering with the problem since September, will now undergo an operation which will leave him sidelined for up to five weeks.

Wright said: “There’ll still be about 15 games left when I’m back and I’ll be looking to hopefully be 100 per cent fit going into the crunch time.

“I had a talk with the physio department and the manager and we decided that we’ll get through until January.

“The team started picking up a good run of form and I didn’t want to miss out on that.

“Although I wasn’t starting, it was nice to be in and around it but it’s come to January now and it’s feeling like I can’t continue with it.

“It is too much to manage at the minute so it’s a case of getting it sorted and hopefully I won’t miss too many games.

“I’ve had to do nothing for the past few days in training, which obviously doesn’t help in the build-up to the game.

“Towards the end of the game, I could feel it - I don’t think you could see it from the sidelines but it was troubling me.”

Wright was unable to prevent Colchester from falling to defeat at in-form Exeter, after coming into their starting line-up in place of the injured Owen Garvan.

He said: “It was very disappointing – we came into the game on the back of a good run.

“We move on and into the next game where we’ll try and get back to where we were.

“We felt we had the majority of the first half but were a goal down at half-time.

“In the second half, we felt we were the team on top trying to get back into the game but they’ve caught us twice on the counter attack.

“I wouldn’t say it was a 3-0 game at all but we weren’t ruthless enough.

“We were quite wasteful but on another day, we take the chances and we get the three points.”