FRUSTRATED boss Jason Tindall says his players lacked "individual responsibility" as Cherries slumped to a 3-1 loss at Reading.
The Royals raced into a 3-0 half-time lead through goals from Josh Laurent, Tom McIntyre and Lucas Joao.
Cherries rallied after the break, pulling a goal back through Junior Stanislas, but it counted for little.
Discussing his side's performance at Madejski Stadium, a third Championship defeat in a row for Cherries, Tindall told the Daily Echo: "Individual responsibility let us down, certainly in the first half, the first two goals that we conceded.
"And unfortunately that proved to be really costly. Conceding the goal just on half-time was a really big blow and I think if you come to a place like Reading and you’re 3-0 down at half-time, you give yourselves a mountain to climb and it was a mountain that we couldn’t climb today."
Quizzed further on the mistakes leading to Reading's goals, Tindall added: "Of course that was the disappointing bit, because you’ve got a responsibility as an individual and you have to carry that out. You look at the goals we conceded, I think that proved to be costly."
Asked if he felt some of his players let him down in the first half, Tindall said: "Yeah, just because of that, when you’ve got a responsibility in certain situations, you need to carry that out.
"That’s your responsibility to do that and I think if you don’t then you get punished, like we did and it’s extremely costly. Unfortunately we’ve got punished for some mistakes and it made it extremely difficult for us."
He continued: "I think there’s a lack of confidence. It’s a young group of players. In a sense it’s a new team that haven’t played a great deal of games together.
"We’re in a bad moment at the minute with the last few results that we’ve had, but it’s down to ourselves to get ourselves out of it and to bounce back and to get a result as quickly as possible.
"The only way we’re going to do that is by going out there and performing and making sure that we do our duties on the pitch and it’s my duty to make sure that I pick a team that is reliable to go out there and carry that out."
Cherries did improve noticeably in the second half, going close to scoring through Philip Billing, Chris Mepham and Steve Cook before Stanislas finally found the breakthrough with five minutes to go.
That upturn in performance came off the back of a triple half-time change with Jack Wilshere, David Brooks and Adam Smith replacing Jefferson Lerma, Arnaut Danjuma and Diego Rico.
Asked if he felt those changes had the desired effect, Tindall said: "I got a lot better performance in the second half. I got a lot more reliability in the second half and we had a go.
"We created quite a few opportunities that didn’t quite go for us. We had a lot of corners tonight that we didn’t make the most of – I think Reading had two corners and scored one. I think we had maybe 10-12 corners, I’m not sure what it was and we didn’t make them count.
"We came out in the second half and obviously won the second half 1-0, but when you’re 3-0 down at half-time at a place like Reading, it’s extremely difficult to bring that kind of deficit back."
