Town boss Mick McCarthy felt his side let Middlesbrough “off the hook” by conceding a poor goal just before half-time and another six minutes after the restart. Martin Braithwaite netted the first for Boro and Patrick Bamford added the second which all but sealed the three points for the home team.
"The overall assessment is that I think we let them off the hook on 44 minutes,” McCarthy said. "And I thought we let them off the hook again in the second half after six minutes.
"I don’t think Bart had too much to do to 44 minutes. They might have had a lot of possession, passed it in front of us. But I thought we had a couple of half-chances we could have done better with.
"But they were really, really poor goals. They’re all good goals when you score them. We lost the ball up the pitch when we should have stuck it in behind them on 44 minutes. Then we didn’t stop the cross.
"That gave them a lift just before half-time and the second goal was just bonkers from our point of view.
"First, rolling the ball where we rolled it to, then the pass that we hit and then the defending for the goal. But having said that it was a £10 million striker that put the ball in our net.”
He added: "We were frustrating them [up until the first goal], no question about it.”
The goal just before the break changed the Town boss’s half-time team-talk and the mindset of his players coming back into the dressing room.
"Of course it did,” he continued. "I think they would have come in pretty self-assured and confident with the fact that we’d been able to certainly nullify most of their threats.
"And we may still have been able to do it if we hadn’t given a stupid goal away on 51 minutes.”
The game followed a similar narrative to the Aston Villa defeat a fortnight ago - "If that story has been written before, I shouldn’t have bothered” - when the Blues were also defeated 2-0.
Asked whether he was concerned that his side had again made little impression at 2-0, he said: "If we gave some of the teams beneath us in the bottom half those kind of chances and those kind of openings and they take them, we’d still find it hard.
"But when you give a team with Middlesbrough’s quality and the squad that they have [those chances], I’m not going to say it’s impossible because had we got one and it had gone to 2-1 we all know they would have got nervous again and there would have been a worry. But we couldn’t, we didn’t.
"But having given them the second goal they looked like a bloody good team and we looked like chumps chasing it around. And that’s unfair to us, that. But it was our own undoing.”
McCarthy admits that conceding bad goals, as was the case today and at Villa, has been his side’s Achilles’ heel this season.
"I know it is and I can sit here and I can bemoan it to you or I can compliment us on how many goals we’ve scored because we’re still in a bloody good position despite [us conceding poor goals],” he continued.
"Last year, we might have had clean sheets and 0-0s and this year we’ve had 4-2s and 2-0s. Which do you prefer? I know which I prefer, I prefer to be winning games rather than drawing them 0-0.
"So, we’ve made our mistakes, we’ve given chances, they’ve scored them, they’re a better team than us because if it. There’s not a lot I can do about it now, is there?”
He added: "Going toe-to-toe against the clubs who have come up or or the teams that survived last year, it’s tough, this league’s bloody hard.
"But you make it harder still if you give chances to good players and good teams. And then they can keep the ball and they’ve got the best defensive record anyway, so we knew it was going to be tough. But we didn’t half give them some help.”
McCarthy says midfielder Emyr Huws suffered a knock in the first half but that he was already going to make a switch of personnel at the break.
"He got a bang on his hip but I was changing it anyway,” he said. "Whether it was him that was coming off you’ll never know, but he made my mind up.”
The Town boss says keeper Bartosz Bialkowski and Adam Webster are both fine despite colliding in the second half: "I think so, I’ve not heard any different anyway.”
Boro manager Garry Monk, under pressure going into the game after back-to-back defeats, thought his team were worthy winners and that they now need to build on today’s victory.
"I’m pleased for the players and I’m pleased for our fans,” he said. "Of course, the main part of today was to show a response for our fans and ourselves.
"I think over the course of the game we were always comfortable and we were deserved winners of the game throughout.
"It was a step forward in terms of showing the possibilities of what we can be. Of course, I still think we can be a lot better and there’s a lot more to come.
"As I said to the players at the end, we need to learn the lessons as well. We’ve taken steps forward this season and then shot ourselves in the foot and taken a few steps backwards.
"What’s important is that we have another opportunity where we have taken a step forward today, we have to make sure and work doubly hard and focus this week to make sure in the next game we can built up some momentum and keep adding to it and that confidence and belief.
"If we can get that to grow, I think we all know what we’re capable of.”