Norwich City midfielder Kenny McLean provided an honest assessment on Boxing Day's 5-0 defeat at home to Arsenal.
"It's hard to sum up really," he said. "It's disappointing and frustrating of course, everything that's not good. It's not us. We're on a poor run now but when you go down as easy as we did today, it's poor. We don't ever want to be questioned for work rate, commitment or determination.
"Sometimes, the quality hasn't been good enough in both boxes, but even as fans you can accept that. You can't accept the cheap goals. We're 3-0 down and conceded two goals soon after that. We can't be doing that. It's not a reflection of who we are, or who the manager or Shakey are. We need to quickly get ourselves together, back to basics and working hard to make us hard to beat, because today wasn't good enough.
"You don't want to be losing games, nobody does, but it's the manner in which we're doing it. I'm a bit stuck for words because I don't know what happened today. Every time we go on the pitch it's an opportunity to pick points up and we seem to lose that opportunity quickly in games.
"Then we find ourselves behind and just aren't getting back into games. We need more belief and to take the games to teams, especially here. The run we're on, [the fans are] still getting behind us and it needs to change quickly because we've got a game in two days, which people have been complaining about.
"We need to show some character and put points on the board quickly."
City travel to Selhurst Park on Tuesday to face Crystal Palace in the Premier League.
"We need to be harder to beat and cut out the mistakes," McLean said. "We need so much character because it's an uphill battle. The position we're in isn't ideal but it's only us who can get ourselves out of it. We're up against it and we need to come out fighting."