"It is a mental thing. You got to be able to be up to it mentally. You can do all the work, all the practicals and stuff but you got to be up to it mentally and we seem to be wanting under pressure today," Lara said after the match.

"When you got a total in excess of 300 runs, you want to put a team under a lot of pressure ... but we were under a bit of pressure today and a few chances went down," noted Lara.

"Everybody will be disappointed. The players, fans and people who turned out and expect this series, or maybe today, get back into the series and level it.

When all is said and done, we got to lift our head and we got to look forward to the next game and make sure we put up a good performance in St Vincent Wednesday (tomorrow)," Lara said.

Lara also explained the reason for belatedly using experienced seam bowler Vasbert Drakes, who did not come into the attack until the 34th over.

"Drakes coming on later in the game was actually to be as fresh as possible in case what happened later in the game, happened. He was supposed to be fresh, not a tired bowler and be able to bowl six, seven overs where he wanted it. Those were the tactics," Lara remarked.

He said the team paid the price for missing a number of catches which let the Sri Lankan batsmen off the hook.

"You are not going to win matches if you give the opposition chances.

One batsman getting three, four chances to play his hand; we just didn't take our chances, we didn't put the ball in the right areas at certain times of the game and Sri Lanka also had a lot of big overs where they scored in excess of ten runs and that would definitely bring the deficit between balls and runs very close," Lara said.