DUSAN Tadic admits that Saints must learn from the 3-1 defeat at Manchester City and cut out costly mistakes.

Tadic, who came on at half-time for Oriol Romeu with Saints 2-0 down, identified individual errors that ultimately led to the club's first Premier League away defeat of the season at the Etihad Stadium.

The most glaring error saw Maya Yoshida make a howler in the opening ten minutes to allow Raheem Sterling to rob the ball off him and burst into Saints’ box and assist Kevin De Bruyne to gift City the lead.

“When you make some small mistakes against this kind of teams it’s really hard and they will punish you,” Tadic explained.

He continued: “I think we need to learn a lot of things from this game.

“Even the smallest of mistakes you can’t have them.

“You need to be more concentrated and focus and that’s it.”

Tadic played a key role in Saints’ vastly improved performance in the second-half, but admitted that his missed chance was a turning point in the game.

The 27-year-old blazed through on goal on 61 minutes, when the game was in the balance at 2-1 after Shane Long had grabbed a goal back for Ronald Koeman’s side.

Unfortunately for the Serbian, he only managed to chip tamely at Willy Caballero, the City goalkeeper, as he rushed out to close the Serbian down.

Soon after that moment, Aleksandar Kolarov made it 3-1 and ended any hopes of a Saints comeback.

“I think we can come back to the game after 2-1, we have my good chance and we have feelings that we can score,” Tadic said.

“Then they scored the third goal. It was difficult for us, but still we played much better second-half.”

He added: “His (Kolarov’s) goal and my chance on 2-1, if I score that it may be different.

“I wanted to chip him, he came onto me and I try to chip him.

“He made a good save. Maybe I could chip a little bit higher but it didn’t happen.”

Tadic was pleased with the second-half performance and was buoyed when Long netted to make it 2-1 on 49 minutes.

“We played with more courage second-half. We wanted to press them and we wanted to play more football, then it was easier for us and that was the big difference,” he said.