Eddie Howe said "sorry" to Newcastle United fans after they were sunk by Brentford in the capital on a tough afternoon for the head coach. A total of 1,706 made it to the Gtech Stadium but Newcastle served up a defensive horror show and were poor offensively after the break.

The players and coaching staff walked over to the away end following the disappointing defeat to find a vast swathe of supporters had already headed for the exits. After the game, Howe told Chronicle Live: "It is always difficult to face the supporters when you haven’t delivered what you want to give them.

"You want to make them proud and feel elated and you want to give them all the opposite emotions of what they were feeling today. I would like to thank everyone who came today and I’m really sorry for what we had delivered and my pledge is we will always work as hard as we can to put it right."

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When asked what the immediate answers were for Newcastle, after now conceding eight goals in three matches, Howe responded: "The answers are always internal. They are always within the group. We have to do better. I have to do better.

"It is a collective thing. We have to do the work and have to maintain our focus on improvement. We will do that I have no doubt about that. It is very difficult to control your emotions in this moment. That is what I have to do for myself."

Howe insisted there was plenty of thought going into his decisions of late and added: "And I have to be very reflective when I look back and make tweaks. We are tweaking things all the time. We are not doing the same thing. I will continue to do that until I do find the answers."

When asked about the defending, Howe said: "I’m very disappointed with how we defended. The four goals we conceded, we’ll look back on with real regret, I think. It wasn’t just individual mistakes, I thought it was collective mistakes.

"The third goal was especially disappointing. I thought we’d fought back really well from conceding two goals. The game was very much in the balance at that moment, so it was really, really disappointing from our perspective.

"It was just a long free-kick, we missed the first contact and then dealt really poorly with the second contact too. That probably affected us.

"It’s frustrating because before the last few games, we were looking really tight at the back and the problems were probably at the other end of the pitch. In the last two games, we’ve scored five goals and looked a really good attacking team, but lo and behold, we go and concede seven in those two games from nowhere really. It’s difficult to work out."

Newcastle now have a week to recover before they take on Ruud van Nistelrooy's Leicester City at St James' Park next Saturday. But they will spend the week in the bottom half of the table with European talk cooled amid a defensive crisis.