GRANT LEADBITTER feels there is too much quality in the Middlesbrough squad to squander their promotion chances despite suffering a comprehensive defeat to rivals Bournemouth.

A lacklustre Boro display allowed the Cherries to ease to a 3-0 win which ended the week on a sour note for the Teessiders, following their impressive victories against Ipswich and Derby County previously.

Leadbitter earned promotion to the Premier League with Sunderland in 2007 and, while disappointed, can see the bigger picture in Boro’s promotion challenge.

“Defeats like this happen,” said the stand-in skipper. “We don’t want to lose any more this year but they happen. It’s how you react, how you recover, and with the players we have, we always recover.

“We’ve had a setback, there’s seven games to go and we take each day as it comes. We work hard every day and see what happens.”

Bournemouth’s victory came courtesy of two penalty decisions by Anthony Taylor either side of a Harry Arter long-range effort, and Leadbitter - who was adjudged to have tripped Arter for the second penalty, which Brett Pitman converted- felt the Cherries midfielder made too much of the challenge.

“What I want to say I can’t say,” said Leadbitter of the Arter incident, knowing the goalscorer was already on a yellow card. “We just know that the boy knows he dived, the referee is adamant he hasn’t which is really disappointing because we’re trying to get that cut out of the game.

“When the referee’s making decisions like that it’s quite poor. Like I say, I don’t want to get into trouble.

“Decisions go against us. Had the referee given [Arter] another yellow card for diving they’d have been down to ten men with 20 minutes to go and it’s a different ball game. But at the end of the day we got beat and it looks like we were beaten well.”

Had Boro won on the South Coast, they would have been three points clear at the top of the Championship this morning after results went largely in the Teessiders’ favour. However, it is Bournemouth who sit top of the tree going into the two-week international break, and Leadbitter hopes Boro can use this time to take stock and make a renewed attempt for supremacy when the fixtures resume on Easter weekend.

Leadbitter said: “There’s going to be a lot more twists and turns now. We’re a point behind top with seven games to go – we’ll have that.”

“We lost three points, three points against our rivals, which we don’t like. It’s not good. We’ll dust ourselves down, there are seven games left and we need to win as many as we can to challenge.

“We’ve got a group of people in there who want to do well, a lot of hungry players. It was a setback over the weekend and we’re disappointed. We’ve got two weeks where we dust ourselves down and train properly, get things right again.

“We’ve had a good week, Saturday was a bad day but we move on. Seven games to go, two games over Easter which will be tough but we’re confident. We have to perform better than we did at Bournemouth.”

“If you win football games you have a chance, and we did that up until Saturday. We’re really disappointed, it hurts. But Bournemouth are a good side, they played well, they take the three points which is fair enough and we move on.”