Stephen Ward today admitted Wolves let their fans down in Saturday’s 3-0 crash at Chelsea.

Wolves conceded a John Terry header after seven minutes and were 3-0 down by half-time as they suffered their eighth defeat in 10 Premier League games.

Away fans paid £50 a ticket to watch Saturday’s game and Ward confessed they shortchanged the sell-out 1,500 following at Stamford Bridge.

“We’ve got a group of travelling fans who pay a lot of money to support us and we wanted to give them something to shout about but we let them down,” said the Ireland international.

“They follow us the length of the country and we were disappointed mostly for them.

“But we’ve seen teams go there and get done by five, six and seven goals from that position, so it was important we showed a bit of spirit in the second half.

“Hopefully the fans could see we had a right go in the second half, when we showed more pride.”

Ward also felt the players let down keeper Wayne Hennessey, who was Wolves’ man of the match for his five saves.

“Wayne pulled off a fantastic save but we let him down because we conceded from the corner,” he said.

Wolves host struggling Sunderland on Sunday, a game which Ward admits has “six-pointer” written all over it with the Black Cats on the same points as them after they lost 2-1 to Wigan on Saturday.

Ward insists Wolves will be ready for it however.

“We’ve got used to big games like this over the last couple of years,” said Ward, who was Wolves’ best outfield player at Chelsea.

“We’ve got three out of our four games at home now against teams in and around our position (Sunderland, Stoke and Norwich) and we’ll set our sights on picking up some points.

“The Sunderland game is massive – a six-pointer.

“But we believe we can get points from anyone at home.”

Away from home, Wolves have suffered five straight defeats but Ward is confident McCarthy’s side – whose next two trips are Manchester United and Arsenal – will pick up enough points on their travels.

“Over the last two years our away form has been as good as our home form at times,” he said.

“We won at Blackburn and have drawn at Villa so we’re capable of it – and we’ll need to do it again to turn it around.”