Oxford United's automatic promotion dream died last night – and now they need to regroup and re-energise to make sure they get into the play-offs.

Their 1-0 defeat at leaders Stevenage leaves the U’s eight points behind Graham Westley’s team, and in third place, with Stevenage and Luton, who moved up to second, realistically left to scrap it out for the championship.

Manager Chris Wilder said after the match: “We’ve got to dust ourselves down and go again.

“The season doesn’t end on March 30, we know we’ve got to go and win our remaining seven games.

“We had fantastic support out there tonight and every one of the players is really hurting.

“But we can’t feel sorry for ourselves. We put a sterling effort in, we just weren’t quite good enough to win the game.”

Stevenage won the top-of-the-table clash with a penalty in the second half, conceded by Simon Clist, and converted by Scott Laird.

It brought Stevenage an eighth successive league win, and they seem on an almost unstoppable march at the moment.

Wilder added: “Their home record’s a fantastic one, they’ve got a lot of momentum at the moment.

“I thought we competed very well, and won a lot of second balls in the second half, but I felt we didn’t do enough with it.

“I think if we’d been a little bit calmer, been a bit more precise and taken a bit more time over it when we got on the ball in the second half, we could have got something.

“It was a tight game. It’s a cruel game sometimes and we’ve got done by what I thought was a soft penalty.”