David Wagner was planning a no-holds-barred Sunday morning review at Colney of the lowlights from a desperate day at Home Park.
Both Wagner and captain Kenny McLean apologised to the travelling support, but the real response must come against Birmingham City next weekend on a league return to Carrow Road.
City head to Fulham in midweek for a League Cup third round tie, although Wagner is expected to make wholesale changes and blood a number of younger players.
Ending a run of three league defeats in four against the Blues will be the priority.
“Every player knows that he can do better,” he said. “We will assess this, we will speak about this. And then we have to show that in situations like this again we can’t lose our head, or play in areas where we shouldn’t play. We cannot leave our positions and leave the space open.
“Something which had not happened this season, and not in pre-season, where we always look very solid and with the right mindset. (Plymouth) was exactly the opposite, and something which should not happen.
“We have to make clear that it will not happen again. The players are smart enough, intelligent enough that they know exactly what went wrong. We will show them for sure. We will discuss this on Sunday morning, and address this.
“This was just not good enough. We expect more from ourselves. And this is what we have to address. We have some injury problems at the minute, everybody can see this, that we have five senior players we miss.
“But this doesn’t change that we have to react better and play better as well. Because if you react better, and if you play to your pattern, you will play better. And this is exactly what we have to do.”
Wagner insists the recent Championship downturn, capped by an abject no show at Plymouth, does not undo a positive start to the campaign.
“It’s quite early season, isn’t it? So we have to make sure that we judge ourselves, and that we don’t get carried away by the results, but the performances,” he said. “And the performance was not good enough, and this is why we deserved to lose. We conceded defeat against Leicester where I will say our performance was good. Although it was a defeat.
“We were quite solid in the defence in the past, and never really looked vulnerable to the counter attack. This was totally the opposite. And this is something which was just not good enough.
“We said this before the game as well, we wanted to show a different face to Rotherham, when we could question the workload, and doing the final hard yards, which we didn’t do in that game.
“I can’t make complaints to the players that they haven’t worked or fought, especially the beginning of the match, I think we were we were in the game, it was quite open. But after we conceded we lost our head.”
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