Stephens: We need to take responsibility

Saints were beaten 3-1 on Humberside on a day when all three goals could be traced back to preventable moments in the build-up.

Manager Will Still handed first Sky Bet Championship starts to Caspar Jander and Damion Downs as Saints’ new-look team continues to take shape, but Stephens refused to blame the recent turnover of players in the transfer window for the result.

“It’s a tough afternoon,” he said. “We started the game pretty well, tried to impose ourselves much more than we did last week, which I felt like we did. We had more intensity to our passing, pushing on into their half, but couldn’t quite create the chances that we’d like.

“Obviously we concede a really poor goal, but there was no panic after that. I felt confident going into the second half that we were going to continue dominating the ball and creating pressure, which we did to an extent, but then we concede another really poor goal, and that takes the game away from us.

“We have to really look at ourselves and work on those poor goals that we’re giving away, because it’s really damaging us. We need to take a little bit more responsibility and a little bit of accountability.

“Yes, we need a bit of time and we need a bit of patience, but we need to go and do it as well – we need to really start imposing ourselves on the game and we’re just not quite doing it enough at the moment. We need to work at that.”

Saints were once again backed by a sold-out away following, even for a 500-mile round trip, with more than 2,300 travelling fans making the long journey north.

“I say it all the time – unbelievable support and we feel that, and that hurts even more when we get results like that because they don’t deserve that,” Stephens added.

“They deserve a proper performance and a proper result to go home with, but we’re going to continue to try, continue to work at it and hopefully we can give them some rewards moving forward.”