Dundalk are still atop the table in the Premier Division, but they suffered another setback on Wednesday night as they slipped to a 2-1 defeat against Bray Wanderers.
A Karl Moore free-kick was the winning goal for Bray, but Dundalk started brightly with Daryl Horgan's early opener, and looked set to bounce back from Friday's defeat to Galway.
However, Mark Salmon's equaliser saw Bray get back into the game before their winner, while Horgan was shown red in the closing stages to add the cherry on top of a pretty bad night overall for Dundalk.
When asked if the European performances have had an impact on his team, manager Stephen Kenny was quite forthright in admitting that his players have struggled to refocus on the domestic game.
"I can't deny that. It shouldn't be the case, we should be able to. It's understandable in Galway on Friday, we had two and half days to get down there and play. That's quite understandable, and we played alright in Galway and lost.
Image: ©INPHO/Tommy Dickson
"We were fairly well on top on the first half here [against Bray], so you couldn't have seen us losing that game at that stage, just very disappointed to lose it in the manner that we did in the second half."
Speaking to Off the Ball's Oisin Langan, Kenny explained that this run of results is not yet worrying, but that they need to re-evaluate what's going wrong for them at the moment.
"It's hard to believe really that we've come out with no points from those two games. The last three years we've never lost two matches in a row, and we've never looked like losing two matches in a row.
"I think we've only lost one game in the whole of last season, and Cork were the only team to beat us this year before Friday. It's quite disappointing from our point of view, it's a terrible couple of results to come out with from Friday and Wednesday with no points from those two games.
"We're still top of the table, but we've got a tough schedule going forward."
Kenny added that the concentration levels and the intensity will need to be increased if they hope to stop the two losses on the bounce turning into a bad run of form that could really cost them.
Image: ©INPHO/Tommy Dickson
"We can't just go through the game with a reasonable degree of effort and in second gear. At 1-0 up, we should have been 3-0 up and then we went on lose the game.
"I think the fact that we conceded from two set plays shows concentration levels have to be high, we have to attack the ball in a way that we didn't."
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