Saturday 15 October 2016 21:54, UK
Hull City captain Curtis Davies says his team were "gutless, embarrassing and upsetting" in the 6-1 loss to Bournemouth on Saturday.
The Tigers conceded after just five minutes and - even though Ryan Mason bagged a fortuitous equaliser later in the first half - Bournemouth continued to cut them open at will for much of the game, scoring three goals in each half.
"Gutless, embarrassing, upsetting. Bournemouth obviously were good, they scored six goals," Davies acknowledged. "But we just gifted them everything. They had four set-pieces which we're usually good at, at which they scored and we just let people walk into the box and put the ball into the back of the net.
"On our part it was embarrassing. Fair play to Bournemouth, they've done very well, but we've got no more excuses."
Hull had endured a tricky run of fixtures prior to the recent international break, losing to Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United, so the trip to Bournemouth represented a chance to get back on track after that difficult stretch. But the reality was Hull's heaviest defeat of the lot - something that Davies says is unacceptable.
"We've talked about how we've played the big teams, we've had ten men, and we've been looking forward to these games now because we've got games where we believe they're winnable," the Hull captain said. "But today was a very harsh lesson and we need to go back to the drawing board because that was definitely nowhere near good enough."
Davies' comments are unlikely to disappointment manager Mike Phelan, who was similarly upset with his team's "silly" mistakes in the loss.
"We've come off the back of four heavy defeats and we've got another one, so we need to regroup, we need to assess ourselves and we need to take a good long look at ourselves, all of us, and improve," Phelan said.
"I thought at times we did some silly things."
