Town boss Mick McCarthy admitted his side were “awful” as League Two Stevenage claimed a deserved 1-0 EFL Cup first round victory over the Blues at Portman Road.
"I think Stevenage were excellent, deserved to win and I thought we were awful,” McCarthy said.
"I don’t think we improved in the second half, to be honest. I don’t think the first half was that bad.
"I think they were better in the second half. They’ve been the best team, they deserved to win.
"Their keeper, did he make some good saves? Saves you’d expect him to make, I think. I thought they defended well, they’ve got blocks in.
"I don’t want to take away from their performance as I thought they were good, but the other side of that is that we weren’t very good.”
Why was the performance so poor? "I’ll be looking at it tomorrow morning to find out why it didn’t happen.
"As teams from lower leagues do, they come and are totally committed and have a right go and if they get something to hold onto, they made it extremely hard for us. They’ve worked their socks off, they’ve deserved to win.”
McCarthy picked a more senior side than in cup games in the last couple of seasons - "I wish I hadn’t!” - which he said showed he was looking to progress in the competition.
"In terms of experience and games played, it was a stronger team than in previous cup games,” he continued. "I certainly didn’t set the team out to get beaten, did I?
"We’ve not played well, but, as I keep saying, I don’t want to take the credit away from Stevenage, who have played well.”
Reminded of Town’s poor cup record since he took over as boss, he said: "My league record’s been pretty good, so you can talk about the cup, we’re out of it. Am I happy about it? Hell am I happy about it. I’m livid about the way we played.”
He added: "I think the team I picked spells out [that I was looking to progress], I wanted to be in the competition, but I wished I’d have picked a youth team, I wish I’d picked them all and if we’d have gone out with a team that’s got no experience in it I could be sat here thinking I deserved it. But I don’t think that’s the case. We’ve not performed tonight."
Stevenage boss Darren Sarll was delighted with his team’s performance and victory: "It’s been a good night, we were resilient and determined throughout and we’ve shown that Stevenage are still alive and kicking.
"We were great at all the honest values a team should have and we stood strong at the end.”
"There’s not a player in my squad that I don’t look forward to working with every single day.
Regarding winning goalscorer Ben Kennedy, he added: "I found him in Belfast four years ago and I brought him over when I was academy manager.
"He had a troubled time with injury last season and needed hip and knee operations, but now he’s back to his old horrible, horrible self - horrible to play against that is. He doesn’t care for reputations or the stage he’s on.”