Blues boss Mick McCarthy admitted his side were second best and deserved nothing from their 2-0 defeat at Middlesbrough
"Second best, got nowt, deserved nowt,” was the Town manager’s succinct summing up of his side’s performance at the Riverside.
He said the players were understandably down after such an under par display: "The atmosphere in the dressing room was as you’d imagine, pretty sombre and not very buoyant after that, not buoyant at all.
"Disappointment as much as anything about the way we played. We didn’t compete, not like we normally do.”
Why was that the case? "If knew why that was I’d put it immediately right,” McCarthy continued. "I could give you a whole host of reasons: we’ve had players away, we’ve had a bit of a broken week. We’ve travelled up, but I never believe that because we have to travel anyway.
"But I actually think they played well. Before the goal there wasn’t much in it but once they got the goal, I thought they played well. They got on top of us and didn’t let us play at all.
"I would also say that they’ve got a fair few quid in that team, I have to be honest. They’ve just signed Lee Tomlin and Danny Graham was being sold to Swansea and Hull in the Premier League, and then there’s Mustapha Carayol, they’ve got Albert Adomah on the bench, who they spent a million quid on.
"So, they’ve got a good side, Grant Leadbitter, who we couldn’t afford to keep, Nathaniel Chalobah is on loan from Chelsea.
"They’ve got a good side and to stop that we’ve got to play well and we didn’t. I guess I should give them some credit because I thought they did play well.”
He was disappointed with his side's defending for both Danny Graham’s goals: "We had the best chance through Tayls just prior to the first goal.
"It wasn’t like us, not like my team, not like us to let Carayol wriggle out of that and then come on the inside and shoot. Unlike us, but I don’t want to detract from them because I thought they played well.”
McCarthy was unsure whether keeper Dean Gerken ought to have done better: "I haven’t really seen that again. I don’t know how difficult it was to stop, so I’ll have to have another look at that.”
As for Graham’s second, a header from a Leadbitter corner, he added: "It was awful marking, that’s not like us.
"Bad day at the office, I go back to my first comment — didn’t get owt, didn’t deserve owt, second best. You can ask me to put meat on the bones of that but I think it sums it up fairly.”
Frank Nouble was substituted at the break, but McCarthy says he could have replaced any of his frontmen.
"He put in as much effort as anybody, I could have taken any one of the three of them off, to be fair,” he continued. "But I was going to go 4-4-2, see if we could get something back and he was the unlucky one who had to come off.
"I thought I’d leave Tayls where he was and see if he could replicate some of last week’s performance, and I don’t think he did.
"Murph looked like he’d been away and hadn’t had a week’s training with us. It could have been anybody.”
The Town boss says centre-half Christophe Berra is OK despite receiving treatment after kicking George Friend’s foot in a strong tackle in the second half: "He’s all right, he’s very lucky, he could have been carted off with that challenge.”
McCarthy confirmed that Anthony Wordsworth missed trip with the back problem he suffered in training on Thursday and said skipper Carlos Edwards was left behind as he wasn’t going to be in the 18: "Carlos wasn’t going to be on the bench, so he stayed and trained with a view to Tuesday and Saturday.”
Middlesbrough manager Aitor Karanka was relieved to see his side score after drawing seven consecutive blanks, a total of 12 hours and 14 minutes without a goal.
"Finally the goals arrived and I’m very happy,” he said. "The first thing is our supporters deserve to see us scoring goals and winning, and the second thing is for my team because they were working very well in the last game at home and they deserved to score goals.
"[I said that] if we played as we are playing at the moment, the goals would arrive and finally they arrived.”