Gareth Anscombe insists Cardiff Blues didn't give a good account of themselves during Sunday's Heineken Champions Cup defeat to Glasgow Warriors.
Despite an Aled Summerhill brace, the visitors ran in four tries to seal the bonus point and overtook John Mulvihill’s side in Pool Three.
Welsh international Anscombe admits Wales’ Capital Region weren’t emotionally ready and says they paid the price for a poor start to the encounter.
“I’m really disappointed. I don’t think we gave a fair account of ourselves. In the last 20, we picked up a bit of a spark, but the game was probably gone by then,” said Anscombe.
“We paid the price for a poor start. Emotionally, we weren’t quite there and didn’t back up how we’ve been playing of late.
“We knew we had to win, and you can’t let a team like Glasgow build up a 15-point lead early on.
“Unfortunately, the first three weeks we had some poor performances and needing to win, emotionally we’ve fallen off a bit of a cliff today, which is most disappointing.
“We’re really disappointed with ourselves and we only have ourselves to blame, really. From a personal point-of-view, I’ve been relatively pleased with my performances, but ultimately I’m disappointed because we lost, and that’s all that matters.
“It’s hard to put your finger on it. If you had the answer it would a lot easier to not have these performances.
“I think our start of the season in general has probably hurt us quite a bit, because we knew we needed to win over the last three or four weeks.
“When you put pressure on yourselves every week, and demand good performances, it’s hard to always back it up.
“Unfortunately, it was a big occasion, but we didn’t get out of the blocks.
“They scored two really soft tries early on, and straight after half time, and that was probably the game.”
However, the utility back stressed the importance of not dwelling too much on the loss and learning the lessons from Sunday, with two important Guinness PRO14 encounters on the horizon, against Toyota Cheetahs and Zebre.
“We’re annoyed with ourselves but now we have to dust ourselves off. The boys go to South Africa and we have another game that’s pretty important. It doesn’t stop.
“Glasgow are a good side. We’ll have to take a few lessons from that one and take a look at ourselves.
“Hopefully we’ll get another chance at them and I’m sure we’ll put in a better performance than that.”