“Once you get them slowed down you should be able to fill the ground better than we did. There’s definitely education there we need to continue to work on. We’ve been working on a lot right now.

“We have to review the way we’re educating it because we’re not executing under the heat of the battle. When the pressure comes we’re not getting the job done.”

The promise the Blues showed early in Teague’s reign has failed to develop into anything significant,with just five wins from their past 18 games.

Teague said that while some players had taken steps forward since he took over from Brendon Bolton midway through 2019,the team had not improved,nor was it playing with the same energy and belief.

“Right now we’re in a real pit. We’re not playing great football,we’re not playing with confidence,” Teague said.

“There’s little patches where we moved it OK,and defended OK,we’re not doing it consistently enough.

“To get out of that you have to work hard and have honest,accountable feedback,and we’ll do that.

“We’ll be strong and clear with the boys on what’s happening – then you’ve got to work on it. You’ve got to work really hard. That’s our challenge,we have to work really hard and roll our sleeves up because today they just out-tackled us too easily.”

Teague said the main area of improvement he wanted to see in the remaining nine rounds was in the team’s defending.

“I want to see a ruthless team that buys into it,gets the job done when it’s time to get the job done one on one,but then also connects to a system and play their role in the system and understand the importance of getting a job done in part of a bigger group,” Teague said.

“At the moment we have a bit of a disconnect at times,and it’s too often. For us to go where we need to go to we need to be a lot better in that area.”

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