WILL Vaulks believes teams are now showing more respect to Oxford United, making the challenge of picking up points in Sky Bet Championship that little bit more difficult.

The U’s have broadly adjusted to life well in the second tier, and haven’t looked out of their depth, with the one exception being the 2-0 defeat at league leaders Sunderland last month.

United were decent value to get a point away at Watford last night, but were unable to find the killer touch in front of goal, as the Hornets claimed a 1-0 victory.

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Vaulks said: “I think we’ve applied ourselves really well in the last two, and we’ve come away disappointed not to take something from the game.

“And that’s against a team who are always up there. They’ve been in the Premier League recently and have got some fantastic individual players.

“I thought to a man, we really stood up to that. We’re just at the moment lacking that little bit at the end to get the ball in the back of the net.

“It’s hard to say we’re happy with it because we’re not, but the performance level was decent.

“Over time, I think if you perform better in games, you take more points, and we have to take the positives from games, and also learn from things that haven’t been so good.

“I think at Sunderland, we got outclassed and outperformed, and we didn’t turn up the way we expect to, but other than that, we can only look at games and say we should’ve had more points.

“I don’t want to say that too often because we have to switch that around.”

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He added: “At the start of the season, we started really well, but I don’t think we’ve come away from those performances.

“I think teams maybe didn’t respect us as much at the start, and also teams take a while to get going.

“We don’t want to make excuses, but we have got a lot of top players in the team out at the moment, and when they come back, that will benefit the group.

“I think the break comes at a good time, and we’ll look at the next load of fixtures, and try to take as many points as we can, which is what we always try and do.

“The break’s come at a good time for us, just to get the legs rested and for the players that have played a lot of minutes over this period, and then get some boys back fit to give us that boost because the more boys we can have in the dressing room ready to play, the better.”