Peterborough United boss Darren Ferguson slams his 'unprofessional,' 'ill-disciplined' players for losing Cheltenham game in the warm-up

Posh put in one of their worst performances of the season as they slipped to nine points behind the play-offs, courtesy of Derby’s 3-2 victory at Oxford.

Defeats for Bolton and Wycombe for the Posh boss were no consolation as he laid into his team; accusing them of losing the game in the warm-up.

"The warm-up was awful and they got warned by myself and Jonno,” Ferguson said.

“I warned them yesterday about any complacency and that it will be a lot tougher game than recently so you have got to get yourself up for it. We were way off it. The players were unprofessional.

“The start of the game was horrendous and the mistake I made was not making changes after ten minutes when it was 0-0. I could see it, we were so slack.

"That’s a prime example of a team playing however they want and going away from the gameplan completely, thinking they were just going to win. You had players playing in the wrong positions running around which is absolute nonsense.

“We’re launching balls onto centre halves heads in the second half - that’s not how we play -. The players were playing wherever they wanted which was complete ill-discipline. If they want to do that it's because we’re not good enough to do our own thing.

The basics never change. If you don’t win enough tackles, don’t run enough and don’t win enough headers you will not win football matches. I said it in the dressing room before the game, but it’s fallen on deaf ears.

“At half time I said don’t start launching it, we’ll play our football quicker but they never did it. They were just running all over the place - it was so unprofessional.”

Ferguson tried to shake a reaction out of his side by making a double change in the 25th minute- bringing on Nathan Thompson and Oli Norburn for Hector Kyprianou and Ephron Mason-Clark - which got Posh back into the ascendency before the break, but they lost all momentum again after the restart.

The Posh boss was in no mood to defend and of his players and even said he could have made all five changes at the first opportunity.

He added: “There are no positives at all and that hurts me a lot. Mentally the lads didn’t turn up today. Do we actually think we’re that good?

"We’re not, we’re miles off it, the season has shown that. We’re nowhere near where we need to be. We’re a horrendous amount of points off the top.

“I don’t like criticising my players, but I can’t defend what I’ve just watched as much as I want to. That was shocking today. The one thing I’ve always asked myself is are this lot mentally tough enough and I got my answer today, ‘no’.

"When you have an opportunity like this, you have to do your best to take it. Before these players know it, their careers will be over and they will have done absolutely nothing. You can’t have a performance like that and I can’t understand it.

“Hector has got a bad ankle, we’ll see how he is. Ephron came off, but a lot of them got away with it. It could have been anyone in that position. I wanted Thommo and Norbs on as they’re experienced and might have just got them going a bit. I had to do something.

"After ten minutes I made a mistake I should have made about four subs, I could have made five quite easily.”

Posh will have to bounce back quickly as they travel to face Burton Albion on Tuesday who picked up an impressive 2-1 win over play-off chasing Wycombe on Saturday.