Mark Robins hopes the Sky Blues can “learn” from their two-nil defeat against Luton Town on Tuesday night.
City were beaten by goals from James Bree and Elijah Adebayo the second of which came from the penalty spot after Kyle McFadzean was adjudged to have handled the ball when attempting a goal-line clearance leading to the centre-back’s dismissal.
The manager admitted that the red card was costly to his side’s chances with replays suggesting the ball hit McFadzean’s shoulder.
Robins said: “Kyle was adamant that it wasn’t handball and having seen it, it looks like his shoulder, from the referee’s perspective in real time body movement might have made it look like he’s handballed it, it’s disappointing because that’s cost us really.
“It’s worth an appeal, everybody here is saying it’s hit his shoulder, clearly on the video it looks like it’s hit his shoulder.
“We needed to take our chances, Max has had three brilliant chances, he’s hit the inside of the post with the first one and then they go and score, the second goal was a killer really.
“At one-nil you can try and contain them and cause them problems with 10-men, they defended really well, they were throwing their bodies in front of things, we defended well in the second-half with 10-men.”
However, there was somewhat of a silver lining for the Sky Blues when Matty Godden returned to the pitch for the first time since the beginning of the year playing the final 20 minutes at Kenilworth Road.
“Ben made some really good saves, we tried to keep going and create things, we’re disappointed but it’s one of those, you’ve got to learn at some point, they’ve been on a very similar trajectory to us and they’ve put a strong performance in tonight where we weren’t able to capitalise on the chances that create.
“Ultimately, we’re going to take hits this season from time-to-time which is difficult to do because nobody likes losing but we can’t just keep doing the same things and away from home the results haven’t been good enough.
“A lot of the time the results haven’t justified the performances, we’re not doing everything wrong but we’re doing things wrong in the game that we’re being punished for.
“Matty needed to get back playing, it’s very difficult because you’ve only got the games to get people fit really, it’s really important to get him some game time and you could see he was in need of match minutes.”