A frustrated Ian Holloway admitted his Crystal Palace players had let him down after the slumped to a 3-0 derby defeat to bitter rivals Brighton yesterday.

Two goals from Leonardo Ulloa and another from David Lopez secured the Seagulls victory as the Eagles missed the chance to go second.

"As the game panned out, I don't like the statistics too much and Gus probably will - I think that tells you that they did better than us," he said.

"I can't remember too many of my lads having a decent game, not to the level they have been playing at and you can't have that.

"In these big games you need at least eight of your 11 playing at their top level.

"The first thing you do when you're away from home is be solid and you have to get to the ball first and we didn't do that. Maybe we need to go  back to that a little bit but, saying that, I don't think we attacked as well as we should have done with the team I put out.

"We had three players who were running with the ball and it wasn't working because they were dealing well with the one-on-ones, so we needed to pass the ball around a bit more.

"We rallied at half-time a little bit but they got the third goal, which is probably the worst goal I've seen my team let in.

"After that, we tried to change it but nothing we did seemed to work which is disappointing for us and we have to look at that because we could have gone second.

"I said at half-time that we needed to get the next goal and I was so disappointed when their thrid goal went in, especially with the nature of the goal because we should have dealt with it."

The magnitude of the defeat would not have been lost on the 2,000 travelling fans given the backdrop of the historic rivalry between the two sides. Holloway though dismissed the importance of local derbies.

"I don't care about rivalry, we have got a rivalry with every single team in this division to try and get up so talking about local rivalry is waste of breath and nonsense," he said.

"I'm from Bristol and nobody cared about the rivalry down there when I moved up to London but it just isn't about that, it's about who can finish the season in those two top places and who can muster a gallop to win the play-offs.

"We'll live to fight another day, we have eight games left and we are going to have do do better than that for our fans because the third goal knocked the stuffing right out of us and I never want to see that happen again.

"I don't care what the score is, you carry yourself proudly and keep going.

"But I know my team are better than what they showed so we now need to dust ourselves down and look forward to the next challenge and look forward to trying to make this one of the best times in Crystal Palace's history."