The Crystal Palace manager told BBC Sport: “There’s nothing I’d want to say to take away from the Newcastle performance. It was as good as we half-expected it would be because they’re a very, very good team, but it doesn’t unfortunately help me in any way because I don’t think we came anywhere near the football we’re capable of playing, both defensively and offensively.
“To come here and lose is one thing, but it’s hard to accept coming and losing as comprehensively as we have done today, and with a few players who are going to be looking tomorrow morning, assessing their performances and coming up probably with the same conclusion I’ve come up with: we just weren’t anywhere near good enough.
“To be fair, I suppose the two goals that came in the 45th and 47th minute didn’t help us because coming out for the second-half at 0-3 against such a good team was always going to make life unbelievably uncomfortable.
“Had it been 0-1, we could have maybe made a slightly better fist of the game, but I can’t say they didn’t deserve to come in at 3-0 because Newcastle created a lot of chances and played very well.
“We made mistakes of course. Several of the goals and chances were uncharacteristic mistakes which the defenders and midfielders haven’t been making. That’s one thing, but you never know what it is in a game that causes you to collapse a little bit in terms of what we’ve been privileged to see from this team.
“In fact, at half-time, one of the coaches rightly said that this is our first under-par performance in the first eight league games, and now we’ve got to do something about it in the second-half.
“Maybe on Monday I’ll be able to have a similarly philosophical view about it, but at the moment, it’s difficult to take that a team we thought could come here and give Newcastle a very good game weren’t able to today.”