Shane Duffy insists that manager Martin O'Neill and his assistant Roy Keane are not to blame for the Republic of Ireland's poor run of form.
Ireland slumped to a second UEFA Nations League defeat in three games to Wales in Dublin on Tuesday night, making relegation to League C likely and increasing scrutiny on the management following the failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup.
"I wouldn’t blame them," the Brighton centre-back told RTÉ Sport. "It’s us out there. It’s not them out there.
"It’s us playing and players’ responsibility to go out there and perform. They can tell us what to do, it’s up to us to go out there.
"We’ve obviously let them down. It’s up to the players to take responsibility and put it right."
Duffy admitted that the team are in "a bit of a low" but believes Ireland can turn it around in their final Nations League group game away to Denmark.
"It’s not been good enough for our standards and where we’ve been the last few years," he said.
"We’re in a little rut at the moment where we’re not getting the results and we’ve just to pick ourselves up again.
"You’ve got to have that attitude of never say die and that’s what we have.
"We’ve got to believe we can go out to Denmark and win and results go our way.
"We won’t give up now. We’ve still got one more game to play and hopefully we can put in a good performance and get three points. You never know where it will take us."
Opinions are divided on whether O'Neill's recent switch to a 3-5-2 formation has been worked but Duffy thinks it could pay dividends in the long term.
"I thought it worked at times," he said. "We kept the ball a lot better than previous games and we created a couple of chances.
"I quite enjoyed playing it and we had a lot of the ball. We’ve got to keep with it maybe and we could progress with it."
