CHRIS Gunter says every player in the Reading FC team will be licking their wounds after the landslide 7-1 defeat at Norwich City.

Royals' three-match winning streak in the Championship came to a shuddering end at Carrow Road where Jaap Stam's men found themselves 6-1 down at the interval.

It was their heaviest defeat under Stam and Gunter, who wore the captain's armband in the absence of the injured Paul McShane, admits there will be plenty of soul-searching in the days to come.

“After the last couple of weeks, you don’t envisage coming away and losing to that scoreline,” stated the Wales international. “It does hurt and it’s hard to take, and for sure it’ll hurt for a good couple of days.

“Sometimes if you lose by a big scoreline you’ll look back and think that they had the run of the ball slightly. But we didn't lose 7-1 because we were unlucky, we lost because we were really poor and weren’t good enough.

“That’s the bottom line and we deserved to get well beat.”

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A furious Royals keeper, Ali Al-Habsi.

Gunter added: “It’s a case of taking your medicine. It’s not acceptable, but we have to take it.

“We’ll take whatever is thrown at us in the next couple of days and we’ll come back and move on.

“If you were to come in the changing room, you’d see a set of really disappointed people. It always is after a defeat but it does sting and hurt more after that sort of scoreline, we’re professionals.”

A nightmare afternoon in East Anglia began when Nelson Oliveria fired Canaries in front in the second minute after Gunter had tripped the Portuguese striker in the box.

Wes Hoolahan doubled Norwich's lead in the 15th minute, Alex Pritchard made it 3-0 on 25 minutes and Russell Martin added a fourth six minutes later.

Pritchard notched his second of the game and Norwich's fifth on 35 minutes and, although Yann Kermorgant pulled one back three minutes later with his 14th league goal of the season, Hoolahan scored again four minutes before the break for a 6-1 lead.

Reading stopped the rot for most of the second half until substitute Cameron Jerome tapped in for 7-1 in the 89th minute.

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Reading's Garath McCleary is gutted with the result.

It was the first time Reading had conceded seven goals in a league fixture for a decade, and Gunter declared: “After those kinds of defeats, it often gets labelled that people don’t care or didn’t try.

"I can assure people that it’s not that.

“We’ve been on a good run and we’ve got a big aim this season and we certainly didn’t go there to lose because we didn’t try or didn’t care.

“We have to move on. One result isn’t going to determine our season. Once we’ve gone through it and worked out exactly what happened, in a strange way we will be better for it hopefully.

“It’ll hurt for a couple of days but we have to get back on it and try and put it right.”

Reading remain fourth in the Championship table, though their lead over seventh-placed Fulham has now been cut to six points with five fixtures remaining.

Jaap Stam's men go to Aston Villa this Saturday (3pm) and Gunter said: “You do learn as a footballer that after time you move on from a defeat, some quicker than others. This one won’t go away for a good few days.

“People will be disappointed, surprised and shocked by the result. That’s where we have to be big enough to accept it. It’s our job to look at why and make sure it doesn’t happen again and be back at it at next Saturday.

“We have had some disappointing scorelines and big defeats and recovered quite quickly.

“This is a big test for us. We need to accept it, hard as it is, but we know it wasn’t good enough.”