Town boss Mick McCarthy pulled no punches after the Blues were hammered 6-0 at Leicester. The Blues manager admitted that he was hurt by the "embarrassing" display, the second away thrashing in the first few weeks of his Town tenure.
McCarthy told the media after the game: "If you want to put awful, abject, poor, I’m quite happy if you want to put that. It was poor from giving the penalty away.
"We talked about being hard to beat and not giving anything stupid away because we’re brittle, we’re timid at the minute.
"You don’t get used to being beaten, but it just develops and you lose one and then another and the manner in which we conceded the goals today was dreadful.
"The penalty should never have been, it should have been cleared, and then somebody runs from midfield and we don’t pick him up and he ends up shooting and it hits Nugent and goes in. It’s embarrassing.”
Whether the eighth-minute spotkick which was awarded for a foul on Lloyd Dyer by Stephen Henderson should have been given was debatable and the Blues boss admitted he wasn’t sure that it should have been: "I wasn’t certain at the time.
"I’ve only seen it the picture from the other side, so you can’t actually see whether there’s any contact.
"But it makes no odds. If we’d have gone across and cleared it — no penalty, throw-in. I’m not going to argue about it, he’s given it. We could have avoided it.”
He says the manner of the loss was difficult to take given that he builds his teams from a solid base: "It does hurt me, of course.
"I take pride in my teams being organised, hard to beat, tough, resolute and, if we can, if we get that organised, good football as well because I’m relying on that, as two Championships will prove. We’ve had good teams.
"We’ve got to sort the first one out. We’ve had two games and, although Crystal Palace wasn’t awful, this one was.”
McCarthy now moves his thoughts on to next week’s home game: "We’ve got Peterborough coming up. I can’t do anything about this one, I’ll look at it on Monday and we’ll take the bones out of it.
"Analyse it, look at it and try and make sure it doesn’t happen again. But if we keep making mistakes it’s going to be difficult.”
The former Ireland boss says confidence is the biggest issue in the squad at present: "When it is a little bit brittle, which it is at the minute, everyone’s feeling that way.
"It was a great feeling last week, and then to concede one the way that we did, you can almost see everyone go ‘Here we go again’. We’ve got to get shot of that.
"If there are any positives, I’d have taken the six points that we’ve got. Were we expected to beat Crystal Palace and Leicester? Probably not the way we were in the team, but I expect us to play better and not to be humiliated like we were.”
Leicester assistant manager Craig Shakespeare was unsurprisingly delighted, feeling that early performances might have resulted in similar scorelines: "You hope that if you put in the performances, you turn out a result like that.
"But over the course of the season I think some of the football, some of the attacking play, has been outstanding and in all honesty we’ve missed the chances, there’s no getting away from the fact.
"I think it’s important in any Championship game to get the first goal and when we got that it seemed to settle everyone down a bit.
"And then to go and score the amount we did, and share the goals around, I thought we were very professional today from start to finish. I thought it was a very accomplished performance.”