Gavin Gunning said that Swindon Town fell back into bad habits and that cost them during their 2-1 defeat away to Newport County.

Paul Glatzel scored his first goal for the club with a calm finish less than two minutes into the second half to give reward to what had been a strong first-half performance.

But then Swindon dropped back and allowed Newport back into the game and they capitalised when Will Evans and then Seb Palmer-Houlden turned home to see the Exiles take all three points.

Gunning said he needed to do better as a coach as his side fell into bad habits after scoring first and failed to take anything away from the game.

He said: "I think we clicked back into bad habits [after taking the lead] to be honest.

"We didn't play the way we had been playing to cut them open and we changed and we didn't give angles and we didn't work hard enough.

"That is my fault, clearly the message wasn't clear enough for what I wanted and where we are trying to get to.

"I will take that on the chin and I have got to do better as a coach to make them more clear, I guess.

"I am not in this for excuses, I am looking for solutions and we have done enough to win that game but sometimes in League Two you get punched in the face.

Despite falling to defeat for the first time as a head coach, Gunning felt that Swindon showed plenty of promising signs and on another day could have run away with the win.

He said: "I thought the performance was very good, we probably put 70 minutes together in total, I think there was a 15-minute spell when we were really poor.

"Apart from that I thought it was fantastic, we were cutting them open, we created loads of chances and hit the post about three or four times, but it wasn't meant to be.

"I think we carved them up in the first half, so I am not quite sure they got to our game plan.

"They had an idea of what they were doing but we dropped off a bit of depth to go and slide in behind and they didn't know where we were going.

"We had numerous opportunities in the first half to score and unfortunately we didn't take them, so that is what happens."

Gunning brought on all four of Town's deadline-day signings during the second half and said that he felt that he needed to make early changes to change the momentum.

He said: "I thought I couldn't let the game go passed us, we just died a death in the second half.

"When we made the changes we got right on top of them again and we have had a lot of chances.

"Maybe Sean [McGurk] has to pass that one in, Harry [McKirdy] got unlucky and hit the post, and we had a few that flashed across."