JOSE Fonte admitted that there is not enough understanding in the Saints team right now – and that they only have themselves to blame for their Europa League exit.

Ronald Koeman’s side were dumped out at the play-off stage by Danish champions FC Midtjylland, losing 1-0 in the MCH Arena last night and 2-1 on aggregate.

Fonte, who apologised to supporters for the failure to reach the group stage, said: “We have a lot of new players, and the understanding is not the greatest at the moment.

“We have to be realistic. It’s not easy. There’s no way round it, it’s not easy to get to grips with each other, but we’ll get there.

“We’ll work hard on the training ground, because we have potential, and all we need to do is keep being strong mentally, because these situations obviously are difficult, but only ourselves can take us out of this bad moment.

“We apologise to the fans, obviously they want their dreams and they came here to support us, and we are sad. Obviously, it’s a difficult moment for everyone, but we have to move on.

“There’s another game on Sunday [against Norwich], which is our main priority.”

Fonte added: “The fact is we need to stand up, because only ourselves can change this situation.

“We’re disappointed, but we have Sunday another game and it’s very important.

“Obviously, we are not happy, we had ambition and we had our goals to be playing European football – we can only blame ourselves.

“There’s many reasons we can talk about, but the fact is it wasn’t good enough, we need to go back to the drawing board, keep working hard on the training ground, because only ourselves can change the situation.”

The Saints captain agreed that the team had put themselves in an awkward situation ahead of the second leg after only drawing 1-1 at St Mary’s a week earlier.

“It was not our best and we didn’t have possibly the luck on our side, especially at home,” he said.

“We should have got a good advantage at home, we didn’t manage that.

“But the fact is today the first 15 minutes we could have been one or two-nil up.

“It didn’t go our way, and their only chance in the first half they scored.

“That made the game difficult, but still in the second half we had a good penalty shout that wasn’t given to us, but like I said before we wasn’t probably at our best, we wasn’t good enough and credit to them, they stick to that game plan and they executed it well, but I think we have ourselves to blame here.

“We need to show our face, accept the mistakes, understand that there’s another day tomorrow and we have a big challenge ahead on Sunday for the league – Premier League is a hard league and we need to move on. That’s what we focus on now.”