George Burley said that too many of him players had bad games on the same day in the aftermath of the 4-1 FA Cup defeat to Manchester City. Town failed to make their first half dominance tell while City were by far the better side in the second half and taking their chances.
Burley said: "It was a disappointing performance in the second half, but all credit to City who deserved to win on the day. In the first half we had the better of the chances and the play before they scored from a corner which wasn't a corner. In the second half our passing was poor, and if you keep giving the ball away against a team like Manchester City then you will get punished, and that was the case. We got one back late on but then conceded another straight away. We had a lot of poor individual performances. You look to win at home and if we had scored at 0-0 then maybe we would have gone on and won. Players are human though and too many had an off-day, and you can't afford to do that."
The FA Cup loss now means that Town have no game scheduled between the Liverpool match on February 9th and Southampton on March 2nd.
City boss Kevin Keegan was pleased with his win and was looking forward to the next round game with old club Newcastle United: "Hopefully we will go there and play well, but if we lose I hope Newcastle go on and win it. In the first half here we were poor and were lucky to lead at half-time. The second half was much better and I was pleased with all the players, although Dunne and Pearce at the back were both excellent."
Marcus Bent scored Town's goal, but he was more concerned at his side's performance: "The goal doesn't really mean anything to me. It's nice to score of course but I am down and not happy and now we have to look forward to getting this out of our system on Wednesday. I couldn't really tell you why things went wrong for us. They passed the ball more, pressed us more and showed more confidence. At times we didn't look like we knew what we were doing, there were too many poor performances and you cannot carry them."