Middlesbrough boss Gareth Southgate is confident his young team won't have their confidence knocked after Saturday's 5-0 home reverse to Chelsea.

He said: "The one thing is with young players, they can bounce back quickly from things.

"I have told them they have to take on board the lessons, but the way we respond is to get out on to the training ground and work extremely hard to be prepared for Blackburn.

"We have to put things right in that match.

"It showed us as a group that, whatever we may think, we are very, very young and we are not at a level to compete with a side like that at the moment, especially with the people we had missing.

"We can talk about should we have picked a different system, should we have picked different personnel - although we didn't have a lot of options - but the fact is that they are in a different league to us at the moment.

"Yes, we made bad mistakes and were on the back foot when we defended. We were edgy in possession and looked nervous - we didn't look like we had belief.

"But the reality is, we were out-classed."