John Goddard called St Albans City's drubbing away to Ebbsfleet United "unacceptable" but both he and manager Ian Allinson want to move on quickly - starting with Saturday's visit from Braintree Town.

The 5-0 thumping dumped Saints back out of the National League South play-off places and down to ninth as their patchy mid-table form continued.

It could have been a lot worse too with the home side racing into a 4-0 lead after just 34 minutes and despite City stemming the flow in the second half, the damage had long been done.

Goddard said: "We were well beaten. You can look at it and say that at 4-0 at half-time we shut up shop and defended a little bit better but the game is done at 4-0. It was done at 3-0 really.

"You have to respect the opposition but if we’d won, we’d have gone [a point behind] them

"We’ve been competing all year so to lose like that is disappointing. It is not acceptable and we know that as a group.

"But there is no point dwelling on it. We have an honest group of players and we have had setbacks already this season that we’ve bounced back from.

"It is important we do that again."

Allinson too was in no mood to get lost in a lengthy post-mortem with focus instantly turning to Saturday's clash with relegation threatened Braintree.

And the boss still feels that Saints can retrieve a rapidly unravelling campaign and produce a positive outcome by the end of the year.

"It’s all about picking up points at this stage," he said. "We’ve still got 18 games to go and there are a lot of points to play for.

"We have had a great season to date apart from a couple of hiccoughs over the last few weeks.

"We have to stop that and we have to be performing to a [good] level week in, week out.

"It wasn’t something I expected and it’s obviously disappointing but we haven’t got time to fell down.

"We have to accept what’s happened, learn from what’s happened and we have to make sure we train hard on Thursday and put it right for Saturday

"That’s the only thing you can do.

"We gifted them some goals and had a mountain to climb at 4-0 but the second half was about just making sure we didn’t capsize and didn’t get beat too heavily and the confidence didn’t wane too far, too quickly.

"I felt second half we coped a little bit more but we have been beaten by a good side who move the ball extremely quickly."