IAIN Grieve has accepted that Bristol let down their travelling supporters with their performance in the 29-27 weekend defeat at Esher.

And head coach Paul Hull, while acknowledging his team have made a dreadful start to the new Championship season, is confident they have both the ability and mentality to recover in the coming weeks and months.

Bristol, as they had in their opening-day defeat to Rotherham six days earlier, stormed into a 10-0 lead at Esher – and were 17-3 up after 17 minutes.

But a combination of individual and collective errors allowed last season's National One champions to claim a deserved victory and condemn Bristol to a second straight league defeat.

And skipper Grieve admitted: "We have to go away and look at ourselves and the areas we need to improve. We had great support from our fans.

"I could still hear them in the last few minutes – and that does help us. We might have let ourselves down a little bit – but we've also let the fans down. But we'll pick ourselves up after this.

"We got a losing bonus point, which is not ideal, but it's better than nothing, and we'll look forward to the week coming. We're going to regroup this week and it's not about individual errors – we lost as a team.

"One thing we want to do at Bristol is stick together as a team and play as a team. The whole team lost the game, not individuals. We'll take away the positives from this and work on the negatives."

Hull has no doubts over his coaches' and players' ability to turn things round after starting the new campaign with back-to-back defeats, against one team who finished 10th last season and another who were in the division below.

"It's been a tricky couple of months – but we will get better as a team," said Hull. "It's a bad start – but I'm fully confident we will get better and I'm fully confident in all of us as a coaching team and as a rugby team.

"There is a lot of energy in the squad and it's disappointing, but we'll definitely learn from this.

"It's about picking the guys up now and being positive. I'm positive about the youth and enthusiasm of the team – and I'm positive some of the senior players can bring us through this."

Bristol expect to receive information about the fitness of two of their five props in the next 24 hours. Mark Irish, who did not play at Esher due to a neck injury, is seeing a specialist today, while Mako Vunipola, who hobbled off after 37 minutes, is having his leg injury assessed.