Town boss Kieran McKenna says criticism from pundits suggesting the Blues have been too open during their Premier League campaign doesn’t overly concern him.
Former Arsenal and England forward Paul Merson, now working for Sky Sports, said following the Blues’ 3-0 loss at Newcastle last weekend: "They tried to play. This is what I don’t understand when teams come up, they’ve got to mix it up.
"Because of this new Pep Guardiola way, everybody thinks they’ve got to play it – he plays like that, Arsenal play like that and Liverpool play like that because they’ve got top, top drawer players. If you haven’t got top, top drawer players, don’t play like that.”
A month ago, McKenna firmly but politely took issue with Tony Cascarino and Danny Murphy claiming the Blues and Southampton had been unwilling to change their playing styles following promotion to the Premier League.
Asked about Merson’s comments, McKenna, whose team has far from taken a single approach across the season, responded: "It doesn't overly concern me because there are lots of people who have to give an opinion on football and I'm pretty sure they don't have the time to watch every game on a team.
"So it's always easier if people feel that they can put a label on a team and this is why when something's gone wrong, and I've said many times if there was one aspect of why this season has been a challenge, I'd like to think we're smart enough to have solved it.
"So it's easy to put a label on a team, and when you're a newly promoted team, and you concede more goals than what you want, it's easy to put the label and say that they play too open.
"I think the reality is we've been very, very adaptable this year, our style of play, we've tried to keep our most positive elements but we've been nowhere near as attacking or as open or as dominant in our play as what we have been in the last two divisions and we've had to try and be adaptable while still trying to keep some of the core elements that make us successful.
"I think our challenges this season have been vast and, in my opinion, have not been related to playing style.
"I think we've won matches where we've been positive and we've won matches where we've defended deeper.
"And we've certainly lost or dropped results whenever we've had attacking game plans or more of the balance of play and we've lost games where we've set up to be really compact and frustrate the opposition and defend really deep.
"So you can win or you can certainly lose as a team in our position in different ways, and if we have a choice and we feel that the team can compete in that way, we'd always try and rather compete in a positive way.
"But we've also been certainly, in our eyes, very pragmatic at times this year whenever we felt that we needed to be to protect the group.
"So it is what it is. I think our reflection would be a lot more detailed and nuanced than trying to identify one area.
"If people really look at the background of the group and where the players have come from, look at the journey that they've been on and then how they competed against Newcastle last week or an Arsenal the week before and say that's about playing style, I would disagree on that.
"We'll reflect on everything as the season ends and I'm sure there will be things we can do better.
"But certainly I'm very, very confident that there won't be one reason at the end of it and to try and label one reason why a team in our position has struggled to win games in this league this season is not the right approach.”
Quizzed on whether there was one key moment in the season where if a result had gone another way then the season might have progressed differently, McKenna said: "I think there's been quite a few. I think probably more so some big moments in the first half of the season and we ended up at the halfway point of the season with a pretty reasonable points total.
"I think we all thought at that stage it certainly could have been higher because any margins that there were in terms of late goals, decisions, things going against us, they pretty much went against us in the first half of the season, and we ended up still being pretty close.
"The second half of the season, we haven't picked up points at as fast a rate as we did in the first half of the season.
"Again, there'll be lots of different reasons for that. There's no doubt that the injury and availability in the second half of the season has been a big, big problem, but it has been a challenge right through the season, to be honest.
"So that certainly hasn't made it easier. And that then leads to a lot of other challenges. That means that we haven't picked up as many points in the second half of the season as we would have liked to so far.
"I don't think it's ever about one moment whenever it's across 38 games it will be by the end of the season or 34 to this point.
"I think we know that we've come up short. We certainly feel that we've been in enough games and the margins have been close enough that with some very, very, very small details or decisions going our way, we could have more points, and we could have been closer to the teams above us. But we are where we are and we know that we've ultimately come up short.
"So, I don't think it's ever about one game or one moment, but I think there's certainly been, as I said before the season and during the season, it was a season where from the jump that we've had, pretty much everything would have had to have gone right.
"It's not been an impossible task, but almost everything or a lot of things would have had to have gone right. And that's not been the case and ultimately then it's just been a step too far.”
Meanwhile, McKenna didn't see the footage of Newcastle fans applauding Town supporters out of St James' Park last week, but wasn't surprised it happened.
"I'm social media free, so I didn't see it, but you felt it in the game, as I said after the game,” he said.
"The game didn't go how we wanted, but there's clearly some affinity between the two clubs linked to Sir Bobby. It was nice that they both recognised that.
"It's two clubs with some similarities, I think, in terms of their importance to the town or to the city and their location and everything right in the middle of that city, and, of course, a nice link with one of the best managers ever. It's a nice thing to have.”