Hounsell damning of much-changed Burton after cup exit

Tom Hounsell has overseen four wins from 11 games across all competitions since taking over as Burton boss on an interim basis

Interim boss Tom Hounsell says the Burton Albion players he called on for the second round of the Vertu Trophy blew their chance of staking a claim in his Brewers side after they were thrashed by Stevenage.

Hounsell made 10 changes to his starting side for the knockout tie after Saturday's narrow defeat by League One high-flyers Wrexham.

The much-changed Brewers slumped to a 4-0 home defeat by third-tier rivals Stevenage on Tuesday night.

"This was an opportunity for players to showcase what they can do, and I think on the whole they pretty much failed to do that," Hounsell told BBC Radio Derby.

"I'm really disappointed, particularly with the type of character that we demand from our players.

"I can excuse certain things, but I can't excuse players being outworked and I thought that was really apparent."

Hounsell, who has been in charge of Burton for the past seven weeks since Mark Robinson was sacked, was damning of almost everyone involved in the defeat - with forward Ben Whitfield and teenage substitute Josh Taroni spared the harshest of his criticism.

"I'm hard-pushed to find a good performance out there, if I'm honest," Hounsell said.

"It's pretty obvious when we have an academy player [Taroni] who comes on and plays 45 minutes and shows more endeavour and hard work than a lot of other individuals.

"I thought Ben Whitfield worked really hard tonight and showed some really good endeavour, so we don't include him in that."

Hounsell said Burton's fight to avoid relegation - a battle that has them second from bottom and nine points from safety after 18 games - prompted him to make the drastic number of changes for the cup game.

"It's a shame we had to use this stage of the competition to probably do what we did, but the league has to take priority and we had a lot of players that needed a rest after a busy schedule," he said.

"We do have lot of games coming up and we are going to have to rely on the squad, so it's important that they put a marker down.

"They had the opportunity to do that and they can't have any qualms going forward if they are not in the squad."