Luke Chambers has reflected on the “crazy” climax at Brentford on Saturday that saw Town surrender a two-goal advantage in stoppage time and return home with just one point.
Chambers said: "Crazy — that’s one way to sum it up. I don’t really know what to say. We’ve been in this morning [Monday] and seen the last five minutes of it, and it hasn’t made me feel any better.
"What can I say? We should have won the game; we should have seen it out comfortably.
"We saw it out until the 92nd minute or whatever very, very well. We played very, very well and to go 2-0 up away from home was a fantastic start to the season.
"To sort of throw it away like that, we’re on a bit of a downer, but we’ll have to bounce back against Stevenage. Luckily, we’ve got another game to look forward to.”
Tonight’s Capital One Cup first round clash with the League Two side provides Town, even with a much-changed starting line-up, with an opportunity to put Saturday’s disappointment behind them and achieve a win ahead of Sheffield Wednesday’s visit to Portman Road this weekend.
But Chambers revisited the Griffin Park nightmare to add: "We definitely threw it away. They didn’t win it but we didn’t defend properly and there were tiny little errors that led up to the goals that should have been stopped.
"It’s just one of those things but we’ve got to forget it quickly and make sure it doesn’t happen again. You’d rather it happen now than at the end of the season.”
One of many positives, despite the late double blow, was that midfielders Kevin Bru and Ryan Fraser, who was making his debut on loan from Bournemouth, were the men to find the back of the Bees’ net.
Chambers doesn’t need reminding of the lack of goals from midfield last season and said: "They were two very good goals plus Fraser’s had a shot that hit the post and came out. Josh [Emmanuel] was up there and he’s put in a good cross and Kev did a scissors kick to score.
"We could have been ahead before then and we’ve looked at the game so we know we had a lot of chances to put it to bed and win it. We know our strikers are not going to struggle to score goals this year so it’s positive moving forward.”
Not surprisingly, Chambers refused to join the chorus of criticism from a section of the large travelling support aimed at central defender Tommy Smith, who was outpaced by Andre Gray for Brentford’s first goal and then had the misfortune for a corner to bounce off him, allowing James Tarkowski to grab the Bees an unlikely point.
"You can’t blame any one individual player,” Chambers insisted. "I think there were so many things that happened before the first goal and the ball shouldn’t be going over us as a back four. Maybe we should have dropped all together and should have been a bit tighter.
"There are so many things we could change and maybe the ball shouldn’t have come back so easily the way it did, but we’re not a group to point fingers and we’re fully behind Tommy going forward.”