Stuart Pearce suffered a first competitive home defeat in charge of England Under-21s but insisted all is not lost in the bid to qualify for next summer's European Championship.
Last night's 2-1 defeat by Greece at Doncaster's Keepmoat Stadium has almost certainly left manager Pearce's side playing for one of four runners-up spots available for the play-offs to reach the finals in Denmark.
Five points behind Greece with matches in Portugal and at home against Lithuania to come in September, England must win both and hope that is good enough.
Pearce said: "Being beaten isn't necessarily the thing that gets to you, it's the performance that contributed to that. Too many of our players didn't play to their full potential.
"Sometimes, with these younger players, that happens. Where you get maybe a bit more consistency with senior pros, youngsters have that up and down thing.
"Most of these boys haven't let me down. They've certainly got a lot of talent so we have to keep believing. For the next two qualifiers we'll have 10 days together so we know what's in front of us and we've got a good spirit about us.
"Seventeen points gets you through as runner-up, that's been historically the case. It's either win both games or that's our lot.
"We've had a good run in the competition, and we can and we will play a lot better than that."
England were second best from the first whistle and goals from Kyriakos Papadopoulos and Ioannis Papadopoulos meant Nathan Delfouneso's debut strike was just a consolation.
England failed to create a single clear-cut chance before the Aston Villa striker's goal 11 minutes from time, but Pearce defended his decision to start with only Newcastle's Andy Carroll up front.
He said: "We've been playing that way for the best part of three years now. It's been a successful formula for us.
"We feel as though conceding space in front of your centre-halves is obviously a big problem at international level.
"As it goes, tonight we probably didn't benefit from having the extra player in midfield."
