Steve Evans lamented Stevenage’s shambolic defensive display as they suffered a 3-1 defeat to fellow League Two promotion chasers Salford.

Boro started the better of the two sides and almost took the lead after 26 seconds when Luke Norris headed over from Jordan Roberts’ cross.

Salford were in debt to goalkeeper Alex Cairns, who produced a wonderful save from Dan Sweeney’s header to keep the scores level at the break.

The visitors punished the hosts’ poor defending in the second half as Stevie Mallan was left in acres of space in the box to slide the ball into the back of the net.

Callum Hendry and Matt Smith then boosted Salford’s automatic-promotion hopes, as they moved up to sixth and five points off third-placed Stevenage.

Evans admitted his side let themselves down, saying: “We gave a scandalous second goal away, it’s an absolute shambles. What should have been a corner to us, the referee gives a goal-kick and from the next phase they do that. But our defending’s poor.

“We get back in the game, there’s 12 minutes added on at the restart, so that’s about seven or eight minutes to me, there’s lots of time left and then within a couple of minutes we have another defensive shambles.

“I’m more interested in sorting my defending out and sorting our response out to that, rather than worry about referees because we can’t effect it in any way.

“If we defend like that next week at Northampton it will be more, the defence have been absolute rocks for us this season but they are responsible today for big goals at key times. If you defend like that you’re not going to get a chance to win.”

Salford manager Neil Wood believes his side have the quality to go up automatically and is looking forward to the run-in with games against fellow promotion hopefuls Stockport and Leyton Orient.

He said: “I think we are good enough to do it and we are hitting a good wave of form, some of our games have been outstanding in the last few months.

“Those are the games you want, it’s a chance to take points off teams in and around us and get us higher up the league but they will be really hard games.

“There’s no easy games in the run-in and the pressure starts building in the week and we need to make sure we aren’t playing with pressure and play the right way.”