JIMMY Floyd Hasselbaink said that individual errors cost his team as the Brewers put in a disappointing performance at home to Oxford.
Albion never recovered from conceding inside the first minute, were two down at the interval and eventually lost 3-1.
After recording two wins on the bounce Albion were second best today, to the frustration of the manager.
He said: “They are a good side and one thing you can’t do is give them a leg up and we did that from the start. You can’t give them anything and we had too many individual errors.
“Maybe after Tuesday we needed more freshness in the team, but we have to say we weren’t good today. We made a lot of errors.
“It could have been worse at half-time than 2-0. Ben made some brilliant saves to keep us in the game. But we kept making mistakes and giving them opportunities. We gave them confidence and we needed to do something to break that and on the back of that attack, but we never really did. And with our mistakes they punished us.
“We didn’t seem to know our whereabouts today, whether someone was close, if we had time so they always picked up the second balls instead of us bringing it down and getting in the game. That needs to be better.
“We needed to win the second balls, get control and then the strikers need to hold the ball and we didn’t do any of that well.”
In hindsight Hasselbaink says that he would have had a different starting line up.
“I took Terry Taylor out after Fleetwood as he has not played for a long time and he’s a young lad. Maybe that was a mistake, and I should have kept him in. We changed formation as we wanted to play two strikers, and keep them on the back foot but when you concede an early goal like that you are straight away on the back foot and then we never got into our stride.
“Once they were ahead, they knew we have to go at them more and then they picked us off. It’s a big lesson for me today.”