Boss Mick McCarthy says he can understand striker Paul Taylor’s frustrations as he continues the slow process of getting up to full match fitness after 11 months out injured. The 25-year-old, who required a bone graft on the foot he damaged in only his third game after his move from Peterborough last September, was replaced after only 23 minutes as a sub at QPR last weekend.
The Liverpudlian played the full 90 minutes of Tuesday’s 2-0 U21s defeat to Cardiff and McCarthy felt his performance in that game illustrated the frontman’s current state of mind: "I thought Paul toiled and fought with himself and fought with everybody else.
"I feel really sorry for him because he’s quite clearly a really talented, talented player and he’s not yet back at his full fitness.
"All players have been there and you want to come back doing what you could do immediately. And when you can’t, you start doubting yourself and beating yourself up and I think he’s been doing a bit of that.
"I said to him after the game that it’s important that he got 90 minutes. He’ll play on Monday at Brighton as well, providing he doesn’t come on and have 60 minutes on Saturday, and will just keep getting his minutes. It’s a slow process for him, he was out for a long time.”
McCarthy, who singled out defender Christophe Berra for praise from the U21 game, says Taylor was fine about the decision to take him off so soon after coming on at Loftus Road: "It had no bearing on the result, it should have got us a point.
"I put him on in front of Frank Nouble, I trusted him and put my faith in him that he was the right one to go on. I thought he might change the game for us with a bit of what Paul Taylor does that you can’t coach.
"But what he didn’t have was the legs and the lung power to get around because they were on top at the time and we needed to stop them, or at least thwart them a bit more and stem the tide.
"To be fair, big Frank put Joey Barton on his backside and they gave the freekick and that should have been the end of the game.
"But we switched off. We took an intake of breath as a sigh of relief and it ends up in the back of our net. At the time I was thinking ‘Well done Frank, that’s fine, that’s stopped the game’.
"Paul accepted the decision, he knew, he was shattered and I was just thinking he was struggling at the level it was.”
While disappointed with the defeat, the Town boss will be looking for a display up to the same standard as at QPR against Leeds today, although with a few improvements: "[I want the same] level of performance, the energy.
"We looked at it on Monday and showed the players quite a few things that we could have done better when we had chances.
"Better crosses, better passes, a bit better movement in the box. Even the very last corner kick that came in and Tommy Smith headed, the keeper caught it.
"My view is that we should be getting across the keeper, even if he clatters him and it ends up in the net and he gives a freekick. Heigh ho, but I don’t want him to catch it like that.
"There are lots of little things, finer details that we can pick out that we can improve upon. But the biggest part of that performance, and of all of the performances, has been really good.
"Then there’s the goal that we conceded. The tiny little detail that we should have done better and because we don’t do it, it ends up in the net. But a good percentage of that performance was very, very good.”