Derek McInnes admitted he was embarrassed watching Kilmarnock slide out of the Scottish Cup on a grim night in the Highlands.
The Premiership strugglers took the lead through Kyle Vassell but Billy McKay's penalty and a Sean Welsh strike earned Inverness Caledonian Thistle a 2-1 win in their quarter-final tie.
Killie were poor in the Highland capital on Friday evening and now must face up to a top-flight survival battle in the last couple of months of the season.
And while McInnes felt Joe Wright shouldn't have been penalised for the handball which led to McKay's spot-kick equaliser – and that Killie might have had a penalty of their own – the boss admitted the team that wanted it more went through.
"I'm really disappointed and I expected more from the team," he told BBC Scotland afterwards.
"We've let them [the travelling Kilmarnock fans] down. I'm embarrassed with the performance, the players are embarrassed by it and we should be. We're better than what we showed.
"We started the game okay but from there on in we stopped playing. We got too complacent and we made too many errors. I thought Inverness were far better than us in the first half.
"Half-time came at the right time and we spoke about what we needed to do better, but what we certainly needed to do better was compete more.
"There's not a great difference in levels between teams at the top of the Championship, and Inverness with the players they've got, and my team. That's a fact. We can lose this game anyway.
"But the biggest reason we lost it was the team who wanted to win it more won it and that is always a hard thing to accept as a manager.
"We're disappointed with our level of performance and we deserved exactly what we got. I felt a couple of major decisions went against us but Inverness treated it like the cup-tie it was and deserved to win.
"I thought we looked second best at times in terms of just getting to the break of the ball and showing more aggression but I thought Inverness had that in spades.
"We went 4-3-3 and had some moments and opportunities but, by and large, the better team won.
"I do think the penalty incident gives them a lift and maybe unnerves us a bit but we've got to be better than that as not everything is going to go your way for 90 minutes – especially when there's no real difference between the levels."
McInnes added: "We've now just got to focus all our energy on staying in the league. In the short space of a year, we've won promotion, got to one semi-final and we fully expected a level of performance that would get us to another semi-final.
"But it's all hands on deck now. We need to roll our sleeves up and find a way of getting enough points to stay in the league because, ultimately, that was the aim at the start of the season."
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