Mark Robins praised his side for their hard-fought win against Derby County to progress to the FA Cup fourth round.
The Sky Blues battled in tough conditions, taking the lead moments before half time when Dom Hyam headed home from a corner.
City battled to the end against Wayne Rooney’s in-form Derby side, seeing out the win and clean sheet to set up a fourth round tie.
Manager Mark Robins acknowledged the strength of the travelling Derby team and shared his delight at his own sides performance.
“I think the most important thing was to get a game. There’s some real positives to take - we’ve won, kept a clean sheet. You just worry about energy levels, but the fact we were able to have five subs today was really important and when you make those changes you’re looking for impact, but we didn’t get enough of that.
“Ultimately, we’ve done enough to see out the game.
"They have really talented players. I can’t get away from the fact that people look at their league position and think they’re not very good - they’ve got some outstanding players, they cause problems, they try and dominate possession, which they did.
“This was a really important game to try and get through unscathed.
"We’ve had injury and illness, but we get through it and that’s been really tough in the past few weeks because you play against Millwall and then don’t play for ten days.
"Circumstances as they are at the moment, it’s been difficult to train, so you need the games to keep ticking over, but we’re not on that roll at the minute, not found that rhythm. It’s difficult because individuals have to stay strong.”
The win means the Sky Blues progress through to the next round of the cup and Robins looked ahead to City’s future clash.
“It’s exciting because you’ve got that unknown of who we’re going to be drawn against, hopefully it’s a home tie or we’re drawn against one of the big guns.
“Financially it’s a really important competition for everybody, thankfully we’re through and can utilise that, it gives us another game.
“(I'm) thankful we’ve gone through against a good team and thankful to the supporters that have come.
"It’s one of those fixtures that people might look at that we’ve just played against them, but hopefully we can get a sexy tie next time for them to come to.”
On another note, rotation meant that several players had some well-earned minutes today, with some appearing for the first time this campaign.
City youngster Josh Eccles appeared for the first time this season and Robins spoke on his return, as well as other notable performances.
“There’s players that haven’t played for a while. Josh Eccles comes in, he’s had surgery on his hips and needed some part of the game to get to speed with it, but when you’ve not played too many games you need to get up to speed with it.
“Jodi Jones coming on in a different position, he worked hard, gave the ball away a little bit, but got himself into decent positions and was unlucky with the ball over the top from Todd Kane.
“Ben Sheaf was excellent today, kept possession, made some brilliant blocks, tackles and won the ball back well.
“Fanky had a tough test today because Ebosele’s a really tough character and we needed two or three players to get a hold of him - thankfully he didn’t produce that quality that he has, and Ben Wilson made an unbelievable save from Lawrence early on.”