By Andy Schooler, Sportinglife.com

Injuries are the main reasons for Britain's worst World Championship performance ever according to leading figures in the team.

After the championships concluded with Britain winning just two medals – Jonathan Edwards' gold and Dean Macey's bronze – the inquests began into why they had performed so badly.

Kelly Holmes, who was one of the athletes who had been tipped by many to win a medal, said after finishing sixth in the 800: "There's obviously been huge expectations because of last year's (Olympic) performance.

"At the end of the day that was the whole Great Britain team.

“You can't put people together as a team and sat the team will do well as a whole.

"There's been a lot of injuries all round. You can't blame any one set of people.

"You can't blame the British medical team for that – we are individuals.

Performance director Max Jones agreed injuries had played a major part, but he said UK Athletics would now look at whether anything else can be done to ensure athletes are at the peak of their fitness for major championships.

"Personally it's a huge disappointment, tremendous really. I wake up thinking `I just can't believe that we're not getting the medals'.

"It's getting harder and harder to achieve medals. We'll go back and really examine what we are doing,” he promised.

"It's been a poor games whichever way you look at it.

"What we didn't bring here was a full strength team. We haven't had injuries at that level before."

Jones pointed out that as well as Merry and Lewis, Donna Fraser and Mark Richardson were both carrying injuries in Edmonton.

"Usually we have around 12 medal prospects and hopefully you get a 50 per cent success rate which is six, that's our benchmark.

"Here we were down to nine with Denis Lewis and Katharine Merry (who would also have run in the relay) which made it four or five. You have a bit of bad luck and you don't get that."

He said funding body UK Sport was bringing in Australian sports medicine expert Ken Fitch to look at what can be done.

Fitch is the former chairman of the Australian Sports Drug Medical Advisory Committee and is qualified in the field. A review will be held next month.

Jones said he envisaged medical staff having a more hands-on approach to the athletes.

"We'll try to say `what can we do for you. How can we best spend lottery money on you'. We want to end up spending money much more wisely in the right areas."

Jones, who expressed sadness at the fact such qualifications were not on offer in Britain, added two-thirds of funding that UK Athletics receiveh was being spent on long-term measures.

"That's the direction we've taken, to plan for the future. We could have used it to plan for the short term and probably got a little bit better results, but then when you look at the conveyor belt and there's nothing coming along."