Paul Cook admitted Pompey had brought the negative talk upon themselves after spectacularly failing to to build on the win at Luton as they lost at home to Stevenage.

On a day when the headlines ended up being taken by Christian Burgess and Michael Doyle's half-time bust-up, Cook was honest about the Blues not being good enough on the day.

He told the club website: 'After all the positive things that were said about us on Tuesday night, everything that is said about us now will be negative. I really felt we’d play well in front of a massive crowd and go marching on to Grimsby, but unfortunately that hasn’t happened.

'In my opinion, we can’t offer up anything apart from to agree with the criticism that comes our way. I’m the manager so I’ll always take the blame — that’s the name of the game. But the players take us to a place where we believe in them and then take us to another place where we don’t.

'These are the kind of games that you have to win if you want to be promoted automatically. At the minute we’ve got an ability to self-implode and that was highlighted. As the game wore on all our bad habits came out — how can we look so strong defensively in the last four games and then suddenly look so fragile?

'Great credit to Stevenage and they deserve all the plaudits for winning the game, while we didn’t do anything near enough to get the points. We’re all disappointed and now we’ve got a two-week break. We wanted to go into it on a high, but instead we go in on a massive low. However, the reality is that we’re still fourth in the league and there’s a long way to go, so we have to keep going.'

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