Mark Robins praised Jodi Jones’ “outstanding” winning goal after the Sky Blues twice came from behind to defeat Burton Albion on Tuesday night.
Kane Hemmings twice put the Brewers ahead, only for former Burton man Jamie Allen and Amadou Bakayoko to peg the hosts back in the second half.
The Sky Blues completed the comeback in injury-time when Jones stuck a magnificent effort into the top corner to hand City their second successive win in pre-season.
Robins said: “The winning goal was outstanding, we moved the ball, they’ve come and pressed, we’ve beaten the press, returned the ball back into Jodi Jones, who sidesteps and hit a brilliant shot from 25-yards into the corner which was a fantastic goal and thoroughly deserved and capped off a really good comeback.
“I thought we played some really good stuff, certainly in the first 20 minutes we had three chances where we could have killed the game off, but we didn’t hit the target with any of the shots.
“The idea behind tonight was to try and get Saturday and Tuesday into them so mentally and physically, they’ve not done it for so long, it needed to be something they’ve experienced.”
Having beaten Milton Keynes Dons last weekend, Robins believes that his side are finally beginning to click as preparations ramp up ahead of the start of the new season next month.
“We got to 60 minutes and we were tired, we’ve trained, we’ve had a couple of days of hard training now and the lads that came on trained this morning, as an exercise it’s been pretty good, it’s been worthwhile.
“The big thing for me is the fatigue at the end, you can see us making mistakes, but clearly, we’ve been making some really good chances and you can also see that things are starting to click a little bit.”
The game was played in tricky conditions as Storm Francis sweeps its way across the country, but Robins believes the harsh weather only made the friendly even more valuable.
“The two mistakes that we made for the goals, we gave the ball away for the first one and didn’t really react to giving the ball away, the first cross they put in they end up scoring, so there were a few mistakes, in a catalogue really, which shouldn’t happen.
“We were searching for things, rather than letting things happen naturally and I was looking at half-time to try and get us back on track a little bit, the changes were made, and we ended up getting a really good goal.
“We’ve got young players and players playing out of position at the minute because of the circumstances, it’s been a really good workout in really difficult conditions, that made the evening really worthwhile because of the way we played and tried to approach things.”