Barnsley manager Michael Duff felt his team shot themselves in the foot as they were beaten 3-0 by the Blues at Oakwell.
Duff, whose side were chasing a 10th home win on the bounce for the first time since a 12-game winning streak at Oakwell in 1914/15, gave Town as good a game as anyone in the Blues’ own recent run, 12 wins out of 13, but were made to pay for errors, two of them on the stroke of half-time.
"We got beaten by a good team,” Duff told the Yorkshire Post. "It sounds a stupid comment, but I thought we were the better team in the first half and we go 2-0 down.
"In the big games, it's big moments. If you strip it right back, they missed a penalty which wasn't a penalty in my opinion and we conceded a goal from a set play and conceded from two straight balls down the pitch.
"For all their good football, we shot ourselves in the foot. With the couple of chances they have had, they have taken them and with the moments we had, we didn't quite do it.
"If we are going to get beaten, I'd rather get beaten playing the way we play. We wanted to get in their faces and press them and we showed some good quality and good passages of play.
"But ultimately, we shoot ourselves in the foot with poor goals, which was unlike us. It's very rarely that someone whacks the ball down the pitch and we get caught like that. Credit to them, they are a good team with good players.
"But there are positives within it, once you take away the emotion of the game. We were beaten 3-0 at home earlier this season and the reaction of the supporters who were here and stayed until the end told you everything.
"We have talked all season about building relationships with the team and supporters and if we'd been beaten 3-0 earlier in the season, we'd have been booed off. They got clapped off today as we'd just broken a 100-year record.
"There's lots of positives. Most people would have taken fourth in the league. Yes, it's disappointing as we have been chasing the top three for a long, long time. We were brave and got beaten and move on.
"This game was based on moments and that's what the big games are [based on].”