Skipper Sam Morsy admitted that he and his team-mates let themselves down as they were beaten 2-1 at Accrington Stanley, whose “horrible” approach he compared to a non-league side.
Goals from Colby Bishop and Harry Pell saw Stanley come from behind at half-time to take the three points, Macauley Bonne having given the Blues the lead with his eighth goal of the season.
"You come to these places, it’s always going to be hard, but I think we let ourselves down today,” Morsy said.
What was the result down to? "They’re a horrible team, they play like a non-league team, and that’s no disrespect to them, that’s just the style and it works for them and we just couldn’t quite get to grips it in the second half.
"I thought the first half was OK, they’re horrible at what they do, they didn’t really create much, as we didn’t. Two goals, we could have done a lot better but it just wasn’t our day today.”
He added: "This is them, this how they play. But I think we’re delusional if we think we’re going to play like we did against Doncaster every week and hit teams for six. It’s a reality check, we’re going to have to work really hard this week and go again.”
Town travelled up to the North-West on Thursday and trained at Manchester United’s old Cliff training ground and the Egyptian international says everything was put in place before the game.
"Preparation was brilliant,” he said. "Everyone’s been on it, everyone knew their jobs, we couldn’t have been more prepared, everyone knew what was coming, but when you step over the white line, you have to do it.”
Were there a few home truths from manager Paul Cook afterwards? A few harsh words? "Listen, we’ve let ourselves down today, we’ve let the fans down today, they travelled in really good numbers, but we have to put it right next Saturday [when Shrewsbury visit Portman Road].”
The 846 fans on the open terrace didn’t have the easiest of afternoon with rain falling heavily both before and during the game.
"They’ve travelled in numbers and that’s brilliant and we’re going to need them this season,” the 29-year-old continued.
"They were unbelievable the other night and we’re looking forward to a full house on Saturday.”
Town had appeared to have built up something of a head of steam following the 6-0 defeat of Doncaster on Tuesday, their third game unbeaten.
"Each game’s individual, it doesn’t matter whether you have momentum, as you’ve seen today, as you’ve seen before,” the former Middlesbrough, Wigan and Chesterfield man reflected.
"The Doncaster game doesn’t matter, it’s back to basics, work really hard and be ready Saturday.”
Morsy admitted it was a painful defeat to take: "Yes, because the way they play is disgusting. I think one of the players just kicked the ball out of the stadium [in order to waste time], I’ve never seen that before in my career. But we lick our wounds and we go again.”
However, the Wolverhampton-born schemer says that despite the defeat there’s no need for panic.
"Not at all, we had a little spell, and this is a reality check and we go again,” he insisted. "We have to be better, we have to work harder, we have to be better at what we do and we go again.
"We know we let ourselves down, there are no excuses, there’s no pointing fingers, individually and collectively it wasn’t good enough today and we know that.
"We work hard, we assess the game and we go again. It’s a work in progress, we’re not going to win every game, but we go again Saturday.”
Town are still to win back-to-back games this season - or since boss Cook took charge in March - but Morsy says the players are just taking things a game at the time.
"It’s just about winning Saturday really, we’re not thinking about back-to-back wins,” he said.
"It’s going to be a slow process to get up the league, we know that because of the way we started, but it starts with Saturday.”
There has been much talk of the squad which was assembled over the summer needing time to gel, but after 10 games shouldn’t that talk be over? Shouldn’t the Blues, who are 19th, 12 points away from their target of the top two, be doing better than they are? "We know that.”
The Blues are next in action at Gillingham in the Papa John’s Trophy on Tuesday evening when manager Cook is set to make wholesale changes.