Peterborough United boss Darren Ferguson admitted his side's defending in the first half was 'very poor' and insists that his team need to improve with the gap between Posh and the top six increasing all of the time.

Posh found themselves 2-0 down to Tranmere with Chris Greenacre gifted two soft goals with the latter described as 'awful defending' by Ferguson. Craig Mackail-Smith and Gabi Zakuani earned the home side a point.

'Our defending was not good enough in the first half. The first goal I haven't actually seen on television, but we definitely needed to be tighter to the guy crossing the ball, although it is an excellent header. The second goal was terrible defending, everyone left it to each other and that is not good enough.

'It appeared to onlookers that we don't do any defensive work when that is not the case, we work extremely hard in training. We improved in the second half and I was delighted to get the lads into the dressing room at half-time only one goal behind because it could have been worse.

'I said to the players to go out there and have a go and to be fair they did that. In the end, I am slightly disappointed that we didn't win the game because Shaun Batt had a great opportunity to score. I was impressed with Shaun, Dominic Green and I thought Paul Coutts was outstanding.

'We have to take the positives out of the performance. We avoided defeat and that is three games unbeaten, but we know we have to improve and we need to make sure that we win our home games. We are getting further behind the top six and we need to go on a winning run soon,' Ferguson told theposh.com.