Sky Blues Under-23s Head Coach Luke Tisdale reflected on a disappointing week in terms of results for his young side.
City exited the Birmingham Senior Cup after a 2-1 defeat to Alvechurch midweek, before suffering a 6-0 defeat at Hull City in the Professional Development League.
Defeat at the MKM Stadium to the Tigers ended a run of four straight wins for Tisdale’s side in the PDL, a run of results which had seen his side extend their lead at the top of the Northern section.
City’s 23s came up against a strong Hull outfit, with several first team players involved and Tisdale gave an honest assessment following the full-time whistle.
“It was a very tough day at the office.” Tisdale said.
“When the team-sheet came in, we knew it was going to be a difficult game, their six substitutes from the first team game against Birmingham all stayed behind to play in the game, even the ones who had come on.
“To be brutally honest, they just had too much quality for us and that’s probably the reason for the score-line. We came up against six championship players and it was too much for us.
“Having said that, we’re still bitterly disappointed with some of the goals we’ve given away. Some of them were down to quality moments of play from Hull, but some of them we absolutely have to do better and make the game more competitive than it was.
“These results do happen, and the reaction is important. There’s a lot of reasons for why the result happened but we have to accept that, it’s all part and parcel of learning and it’s a great test for our players because some of the lads they came up against had played against Birmingham only half hour earlier.
“There’s certainly not been a performance like that this season and even over the last few seasons, so we’re going to just have to take this one on the chin, not hide from it and work really hard towards the Peterborough game.”
Before City welcome Peterborough to the Alan Higgs Centre in December, they have two friendlies against Hungerford Town and Brentford B.
Tisdale told how he will use those games to take a look at a few things, as well as give some players who have been lacking match minutes a chance to build that up.
“We have some friendlies between now and that game, which we will be using for getting people match minutes and looking at some trialists and some under-18s, so we’re not really going to be chasing results too hard in the next two games, it will be about managing the group and managing everyone’s levels.”
Earlier that week, City exited the Birmingham Senior Cup and Luke gave his thoughts on the narrow defeat to Alvechurch.
“We have to give credit to Alvechurch because they were fantastic on the night. We were bitterly disappointed because it’s a competition that we wanted to do well in.
“How the cards fell on the night it meant that Fabio Tavares and Ryan Howley were unavailable for the game because they trained with the first team.
“Jonny Ngandu took a knock in training, so he missed out and that’s on top of missing Marco Rus, Harrison Nee and Aidan Finnegan, so we had to play with Declan Drysdale and Marcel Hilssner in the centre of midfield and Ricardo Dinanga and Wesley Jobello up front, which for all of them is none of their natural positions.
“We would have liked to have fielded a much stronger team and we would have done if that was possible, but obviously the first team takes priority as it should do and always will do and that dictated the team which we were able to put out on the evening.
“We still had 11 professional on the pitch and everyone knew their roles and responsibilities we just didn’t do them well enough on the night.”