After the final whistle on Sunday, Royals skipper Graeme Murty was understandably finding relegation very difficult to accept.

"I still don't think it's really struck home yet. There are a lot of disheartened players," Murts began.

"It's the worst game I've ever experienced as a professional footballer. I'm sure all the lads feel the same.

"This is the first time that it's been out of our hands. We've put in a good performance, scored four good goals, and it still wasn't enough.

"You ask yourself 'have I done as much as I can do?' All we could do today was push on and make sure we won.

"We did that handsomely and I thought we deserved it. But we had the realisation that we were relying on other people.

"The lads made sure we did our job. It didn't come off, but we shouldn't have had to rely on anyone else. We should have been doing it ourselves."

On the afternoon, a cruel twist conspired against the Royals but the dejected right-back was brave enough to admit that we deserve to finish where we finished.

"We put a lot into today, and into the last seven or eight months, but the table doesn't lie at the end of the season.

"We were top of the league in the Championship and the manager said 'judge us at the end'.

"We were flying in the top flight and he said 'judge us at the end'.

"Unfortunately the harsh reality is that now you are judging us at the end of a season in which we've not been good enough.

"We've not scored enough goals, we've not kept enough clean sheets and ultimately it's cost us.

"I think we had enough in the camp to get ourselves out of the situation we found ourselves in. But it hasn't happened for us.

"We let ourselves get dragged into it and we can't rely on one day's results.

"For the life of me I couldn't see Fulham going to Portsmouth and winning, but they've done it and fair play to them.

"They've had a fantastic run and they deserve to be in the Premier League, and we don't. Ultimately it's down to us."

Asked how he would deal with such severe disappointment, Murts said "I'm going to go away and sulk for about two weeks!

"My wife knows she's in for the hardest two weeks of our marriage because I'm not going to speak to her, at all. I'm just going to be in a bad mood. That's just the way we are.

"No-one had better phone me, or talk to me. But I'll come out of it at the end of it. Because I want to be back in the Premier League."

And Murts knows that, as skipper, he has to rally the troops and ensure this dark cloud doesn't hover over the club for too long.

"Mentally it's going to be very difficult to deal with but we have to make sure that, as a squad, we get together and deal with it properly.

"We can't allow this to linger on. All too often relegation from the Premier League has cost teams a good start to the Championship season. We can't allow that to happen.

"We've got to make sure we're ready to bounce back. If we allow this feeling to linger then other teams are going to take advantage, and I would hate to see that happen.

"After being such a 'stealth' club for so long, now we are something of a 'scalp'. People are going to want to beat us down a little bit, but we've got to big enough to accept that challenge.

"From day one of pre-season we need to have the right mentality and as club captain that is part of my role.

"I'll be ready to go and hopefully that rubs off on the players. I'm sure it will.

"It's hard to take, but we have to acknowledge why this has happened and learn lessons from it."