Boss Mick McCarthy has revealed that he invited his squad to sit down and watch Tuesday’s 3-2 FA Cup replay defeat at Preston yesterday morning. The Town manager was angry immediately after the game, feeling his team had needlessly gifted Lilywhites’ striker Joe Garner his second-half hat-trick.
"I asked the players to look at it this morning because I was having a growl on Tuesday,” he said at yesterday’s pre-match press conference.
"I don’t get like that too often, about twice a year. That’s once, I hope I don’t have to do it again.
"There were a lot of things I was just annoyed, frustrated and angry about. I started picking the bones out of it after the game and I stopped as that’s probably not the time to do it.
"So I asked them to look at it this morning before I even went in and watched it with them. And you could hear ‘I could have done better with that header’, ‘I could have tucked round’, ‘I should have won that’.
"They’ve got to recognise it, if they don’t see themselves as part of the problem for the goal then they’ve not chance of being part of the solution. They’ve got to recognise it themselves and they did, to be fair to them.
"I’m not bothered about that game, that’s gone, but don’t let it happen again. Once it’s been pointed out, let’s not see it again.”
McCarthy felt that his approach was the best one to take in the circumstances: "They might not have looked at the goals we conceded, we don’t always do it as players, sometimes when you’ve made the mistake the last thing you want to do is look at it because you have to own up to it.
"I thought it was better that they saw it first. If I come in and I’m pointing fingers, what you can get is ‘Well, that could have happened, this could have happened...’. If they look at it themselves and they’re honest, they’ll ask themselves ‘Could I have done a little bit better?’.
"There are all sorts of ways of doing it. Finger pointing and screaming and shouting doesn’t work. That’s why I stopped on Tuesday.”
He was particularly disappointed with the manner of the goals at Preston given the stress he puts on defending and also as they gave away bad goals in the defeat to QPR at the weekend.
"I just thought they were real soft goals, not like us and we gave them away against QPR as well, so it was on the back of that, that just compounded the three goals we’d given away already.
"All could have been avoided. All were, I thought, gifts from our point of view. Certainly the first one [at Preston] was just organisational.
"I don’t mind people making mistakes, the keeper drops one, he makes a mistake, Tommy on Saturday, he made a mistake and it ends up in the net. They’ll probably make one of them a season.
"It’s when they don’t do their jobs properly I get really annoyed because we spend a fair bit of time on making sure everybody knows whose jobs they are, what jobs they do.
"And then to concede straight after the kick-off [at Preston] and then late on in the game. There were so many little errors, it wasn’t down to one mistake, it just could have been avoided. I thought it was a game we should have won.”
McCarthy says it doesn’t take much for all that work on defending to be undone: "It only takes one not to do it, certainly when it comes to marking for a corner, and it can end up in the back of your net.
"The throw-in that QPR took and they let Niko Kranjcar wriggle out of the corner, that’s not us, that’s never us.
"If I was in training and somebody got the ball in that corner, I’d be saying ‘Don’t let him get out of there’, and if he did, I’d be stopping the session and saying ‘How did you let him out of there, you shower’.
"And that’s in training, so you can imagine how I felt when he wriggles out of there and puts it in the bottom corner, that’s not us.
"But we’re all human, we’re all fallible and we all have periods in a season where we lose, we make mistakes, it costs us games. There’s only Arsenal who have gone the season without losing.
"You have periods in a season and we’ve got to get over it now and come back. Let’s hope it’s Saturday, it might not be, that’s the way it is, that’s the way life is, it doesn’t always go the way you want it to go.
"But at some stage you have to turn it around and get back playing well, and for most of the season, apart from the last two, we’ve been different class, we’ve done great.”