Boss Mick McCarthy was disappointed that his side didn’t finish Leeds off when they were ahead and on top in the first half and with the visitors’ winning goal just after half-time. Keeper Scott Loach held his hands up to making an error on Ross McCormack’s distance strike which beat him down to his right.
The Blues were hugely impressive in the first 20 minutes during which time David McGoldrick put them in front and McCarthy felt his team ought to have secured the three points during that spell: "You’ve got to make the most of it and put them to the sword when you’re playing as well as that, and I thought we could have done.
"Cressy hit the bar, then they got a fortuitous break. [Luke Varney]’s got to finish it and he finished it well, but I don’t think the [initial] shot’s ever going to trouble Loachy and it bounces into Varney’s path and he scores.
"It changed the course of the game, it was a bit more even after that. Then their second is a really poor one, that gave them something to hang on to, changed the course of the game and maybe how people felt on the pitch.”
He added: "They’ve got some good, experienced players. I thought their front two and McCormack were a real handful, although I thought in the first half we dealt with it fairly comfortably.
"They’ve got good experience in there and I thought they defended doggedly and defended well. But we had our chances even in the second half.
"We had enough corners if we’d had good enough delivery, if we’d got something on the end of them. But it was disappointing, of course.”
McCarthy said keeper Loach held his hands up to the error: "He came in and apologised and coughed it.
"If he had come in and said it was a deflection I might have had a different view on it. He should have saved it, he knows he should have saved it, no point dancing around the issue, it shouldn’t be in our net.
"For all the other bits that should have been repaired there, that shouldn’t have gone in our net.”
McCarthy was able to take some positives from the defeat: "I know what the good things were in the game, the start and the way we played.
"They’re a great bunch of lads, but it never feels like there are any pleasing aspects when you’ve just been beaten at home, or away from home.
"We needed to win that game or certainly not get beaten in it. That goal that they got from a lucky deflection, unlucky on our part, and it ends up as 1-1, so be it, but we shouldn’t concede that second poor goal. Right from us giving the ball away to it ending up in the net it was just poor.”
The Town boss felt full-backs Aaron Cresswell and Elliott Hewitt had done well before the break but that his side didn’t make the most of their threat: "If you analyse the way they’re playing, they’re playing a diamond and they’re playing very narrow.
"There’s width on the outside and the width on the outside comes from your full-backs and if you’ve got full-backs that can get forward with the energy of Cressy and Elliott, who I thought was good in the first half going forward, that’s where the room is.
"Tactically, if you know that, that’s where we’re going to get a bit of joy. And we did but we didn’t make them pay.”
Leeds boss Brian McDermott admitted his side was very much second best in the early part of the game: "First 20 or 25 minutes they were on top and they’ve scored and they could have scored again when they hit the post.
"Then we got ourselves back into it. We had to change our shape in the second half and I thought we got to grips with it and we’ve got a quality player who scored a quality goal.
"We then threw our bodies on the line at the end with lots of corners coming in. I thought we were decent value for an away team to get the result.”