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"Good teams win promotion and I thought we were unified in what we did. The experience that we have had - and the disappointments - will be useful. We do not want those disappointments to grow. But we have a good group here. I am confident that we will still achieve our objectives this season.
"I will take that (level of performance) again, because that will win games. We have got to be top-class now. There is no margin for too many errors from this point in. But we can do it. I am not too concerned we haven't scored many against the top teams because they have not scored too many goals against us either. What disappoints me more is losing a big game like this.
"We have got some fantastic games coming up. We have got to win a game against one of our major rivals, that is true. But I think we can. In all the games against the top sides, we have not scored or conceded. And then the one we do concede is the result of a real mistake.
"We did not score and, at home, you have to get a goal. We had a decent first half. We were not at the same level in the second half but it would have been some performance if we had been. For the goal, there was some confusion at the back. Smith had the ball and, if the boy had not fallen on him, he would probably have collected it.
"I have seen softer fouls given. But there were three or four mistakes that led to the goal. We were competitive for the large part of the game. It was unfortunate for things to be decided on the back of a mistake. We've been severely punished for making a mistake.
"I don't think we had any clear-cut chances - the ones that we had we had to work hard for. There wasn't a glaring miss but there were one or two where the boys felt they should have done better. We had opportunities to score but goal-scoring chances shouldn't have to be gift-wrapped. There were occasions in the first half where we should have delivered better balls into the box and in the second half when we did we were too cavalier."