Ronald Koeman has urged his side to take the positives from the second half of their 3-1 defeat to Manchester City as they bid to make the semi-finals of the League Cup for only the third time in the club’s history.

Defeat at the Etihad Stadium ended Saints’ unbeaten away record in the Premier League this season, and meant back-to-back defeats for the first time in the campaign.

Saints have to dust themselves off though with Liverpool visiting St Mary’s on Wednesday night for the Capital One Cup quarter-finals.

“It’s important that the players take out of the positives from the second half,” insisted Koeman.

“Then you see if we play our level, if we have good ball possession, we have players between the lines, we can make it difficult to the big ones.

“We had the best chance to score the 2-2 from Tadic, and some other counter attack situations stopped by the referee.

“The 3-1 killed the game after that.”

Koeman also defended his team selection for the game at City.

He made four changes to the side that lost to Stoke the previous weekend.

One was enforced with Graziano Pelle serving a one-game ban, but the others were tactical as Maya Yoshida came in for Cedric Soares, who was not even in the match day squad, while Dusan Tadic found himself amongst the subs.

Yoshida’s error led directly to the first goal, while Saints improved immeasurably in the second half after Tadic was introduced.

However, Koeman insisted that the defeat had much more to do with individual errors than line-ups or tactics.

He said: “Of course we did it different but I think it’s not a question about the tactics, about players, about the line-up today if you make that kind of mistakes what we did in the first 20 minutes.

“At least we showed in the second half that we can keep the ball and we can have good ball possession.

“If you do that kind of mistakes then you know against City they punish you.

“Maybe we were lucky it was only 2-0 after 20-25 minutes because we lost every ball in our ball possession. That’s not about system or tactics, it’s about play the ball to the good colour.

“See the first goal – if you lose that on that position on the pitch then you know against players like Sterling they will punish you for that.”

The decision to replace Cedric with Yoshida was a tactical one and when asked how frustrating it was to see such a basic error leading to a goal after that call Koeman admitted: “That’s true. It’s true. It’s always difficult if you change a player in their position and he is making a mistake and they punish you.

“We had more players doing that kind of mistakes in the first 20 minutes.”