ALAN Curbishley cut an angry figure after watching his West Ham team outplayed by Sven Goran Eriksson's Manchester City.

The Irons boss admitted that he had comprehensively lost the tactical battle with former England coach Eriksson, whose side put on a "classic away performance" at Upton Park.

And Curbishley, who had hoped to succeed the Swede as coach of the national side, insisted that his players have to improve immediately if they are to avoid a second-straight season of struggle.

"It didn't work for us - it didn't happen. There were disappointing performances from everybody and I'm disappointed in myself," he admitted.

"We looked very tentative after we went a goal down. We tried to pass our way out of it, but to no avail.

"We got to vital situations and it broke down. Manchester City looked comfortable - they were asking us questions but we had no answers.

"Everything they wanted to do happened - we couldn't affect the game at all."

The East Enders were a pale shadow of the side that won seven of their final nine games of last season to retain their Premier League status, with Bobby Zamora and Lee Bowyer particularly off-colour.

While Eriksson's City stroked the ball around confidently, Curbishley attempted to raise his players from their own collective state of lethargy by making a host of tactical and positional changes, but all to no avail.

Afterwards, the West Ham manager was quick to admit that he had got it wrong.

"I moved too many people around in the second half - Etherington, Ljungberg, Zamora and Bellamy - but I was trying to find a spark,"

said Curbishley, who refused to blame injuries to captain Lucas Neill, Scott Parker and Julien Faubert for his side's defeat.

"I apologised to a couple of them for playing them out of position, but I was hoping that the two centre halves could look after their two front men and if we got done 2-0, we got done 2-0.

"I just wanted to try and get back in the game, but we didn't take our chance to do that.

"Perhaps it would have been as well left alone."

One of Curbishley's many changes saw the fit-again Dean Ashton return for his first Upton Park appearance since April 2006, but not even the sight of the former Norwich City forward could lift the home side.

"He's obviously going to need a bit more time. He needs games and the ideal situation is not what happened against City," said Curbishley, who dismissed reports linking the Irons to Newcastle winger Nolberto Solano.

"He was a little but rusty when the ball was going up to him, but I don't think we helped him by making runs off him.

"(Robert) Greeny's the only one who comes out with anything from that game - I think the rest of them have got to look at themselves."

One of those to disappoint was debutant Freddie Ljungberg.

"It was a disappointment to lose the game, but there were some positives in that we created some chances and could have scored," said the 30-year-old.

"But we didn't and they counter-attacked and scored with three-or-four minutes to go.

"We didn't start that well and they broke away twice and scored their goals, which we were not too pleased about."

Eriksson, meanwhile, felt his side deserved their victory.

"For half-an-hour, I think West Ham played some very good football and made us work hard to stop them scoring," the Swede told the Echo.

"We didn't play excellent football for the whole 90 minutes, but for at least half of the game we were the better team and created chances on much more occasions than they did."