NIGEL Clough says the Brewers beat themselves as they conceded twice in injury time to throw away three points and lose 2-1 at Tranmere.
Albion took the lead through a Lucas Akins' penalty and with 90 minutes up looked to have secured a victory but after conceding in stoppage time at Portsmouth gave away two more goals today.
Clough said: "We controlled a lot of the game but didn't get the goals we should have done and then through naivety at the end lost the game.
"We go on to the lads all the time about not giving needless free kicks away as anyone at any level can pop up and put one in the top or bottom corner and they did that today.
"Then you are under the cosh for the last couple of minutes and one great cross and we end up losing the game - we should have comfortably won on our second half performance.
"Tranmere are a different challenge to Coventry and Portsmouth and we dealt with them for the first 20 minutes without doing too much ourselves. Then we got on top, started passing it around and dominated the second half.
"The number of opportunities we have had to only get the one goal is nowhere near enough reward."
Clough is frustrated with the number of points his team has thrown away already this season.
He said: "That's why we are where we are in the league instead of being in the top three or four. It's five points in the last few days. We should have had points against Ipswich and Rotherham as well. We are literally beating ourselves and throwing points away.
"The injuries start to bite as well and we lost John Brayford (calf) and Stephen Quinn (knee) as well as having John-Joe O'Toole and Scott Fraser missing. That's where we rely on people coming in but we didn't quite do our jobs today."
Clough says Brayford will almost certainly now miss the Bournemouth game on Wednesday.
"He will probably be at least two weeks, maybe longer than that."
Clough hopes his team can now learn from this defeat.
"Next time it happens we have to deal with it better than we did today that's how we measure if we are learning and improving."