GARY Waddock ordered his players to stay out on the pitch after last Saturday’s 4-1 drubbing at the hands of Yeovil – because he needed time to calm down.

The furious boss instructed his team to remain there in front of the fans while he and his assistant Martin Kuhl tried to compose themselves in the wake of one of the club’s worst performances of the season.

Waddock said: “We told them to stay out there. We needed time to think over our thoughts.

“I felt I had been hit by a bus and I didn’t want to say things off the top of my head and end up regretting it.

“I wanted them to have a chat among themselves first and to have their warm down before I spoke to them.”

But he said that when they did come in he made it clear he wasn’t happy.

He said: “ I can’t accept that type of performance. They let themselves down. After some good performances I think everybody had added on the three points before we started and I had warned them on Friday they couldn’t do that.”

The players looked shellshocked as they emerged from the changing room afterwards.

Then they were put through it again on Monday as Waddock called them in to go through it again before drawing a line under it.

Waddock said: “It wasn’t a crisis meeting but it was a meeting that I wanted.

“I said what I wanted to say on Saturday and so did Martin but I wanted to have a clearer, calmer meeting on the Monday.”

But while Waddock won’t refer to it again on the training field he admits it is still eating him.

He says the display was so bad that he didn’t even want to put his players through a video nasty of it.

He said: “I always try and look for a positive but when I viewed the game again on the Sunday I didn’t really see many positives so I couldn’t see the point in watching it again with them.”

And he didn’t want to watch it again either.

He said: “I still haven’t got last Saturday out of my system. It still hurts me but I am positive again.

“After Bristol Rovers and Southend everybody saw a bit of light and thought we can get out of this and then with one performance that big black cloud came back.

“We will see some light again in games and then the cloud will return again.

“There are going to be good periods and there will be dark periods we have to remain focused and make sure there are more light periods.”