No sulking at Saints as they bid to remain in the race for a Premiership play-off place

Phil Dowson's side were well beaten on Saturday evening, going down 37-22 at London Irish, who leapfrogged Saints to move up to fourth in the standings.

There are just two games to go, with the black, green and gold hosting Saracens on April 15 before travelling to Newcastle Falcons six days later.

And Ludlam said: "We've got to come back with key improvements and give ourselves the best position to get into a play-off position.

"We're frustrated, we're disappointed obviously but we can't be moping around and sulking, we need to get back on the horse as soon as possible.

"We'll just look at the next game. The next one's the most important one.

"We need to give ourselves the best opportunity to get the win.

"We know we need to win.

"We've got to come in next week ready to learn, ready to work because this is a team that wants to be in play-off positions.

"It might be out of our hands now but all we can focus on is being better and getting a win against Sarries."

So what went so badly wrong for Saints on a night when Irish enjoyed so much possession and territory?

"I think our energy was probably in the wrong place," Ludlam said. "We didn’t stop their momentum well enough.

"I think we were urgent, but we folded to the wrong places too quickly, so we’ve got lads overworking, going to blindsides and leaving holes through the middle, where it was impossible to win collisions.

"I don’t think there’s a lack of effort there at all, I think there’s a lack of mental processing, just to understand and see the picture as quickly as possible and go and execute the plan as well, which we didn’t do well enough."

Twice Saints got back to seven points behind in the game, but they were unable to build any sort of momentum against an Irish team who had a huge amount of it throughout.

"The best teams go over and over again and keep the pressure on and double up on positives, and unfortunately we didn’t do that well enough," said Ludlam, who returned from England duty to start for Saints.

"You saw we got positive and then we allowed them back into the game with a breakaway away and left ourselves with too much to do.

"I think we’ve shown there in spells that we can defend well, we’ve shown there in spells we can attack brilliantly, we can score tries.

“However, that needs to be a constant, that needs to be a thing that never goes away if we want to be winning these games."