Blues boss Paul Jewell says his central defenders weren’t the only ones to blame for Town’s poor defending in the 5-2 home defeat to Southampton on Tuesday night. He believes his side need to defend better as a team.

Jewell says his defenders weren’t the only ones at fault against the Saints: “I think we spoke the other night about defending as a team and attacking as a team, and some of the stuff which went on in front of the back four on Tuesday night wasn’t great.

“I don’t want this to become a Tommy Smith and Damien Delaney witch-hunt, it’s not that at all. We need to improve.

“Ívar Ingimarsson is injured, he’s out for a couple of weeks at least, and we’ve got two left-sided centre-halves there. There’s an imbalance there, we understand that.

“No one understands that better than me and the frustration of trying to get someone in to help us has been enormous.

“Tommy and Damien are good players, international players in their own right. We can do better, we’ve worked on the training ground, but we’re making basic errors and we’re getting punished.”

The Blues boss says he’s not unduly worried by Ingimarsson’s absence, despite the Icelander’s current thigh problem and spells out last year when the veteran - who is 34 today - was at Reading: “I’m not concerned about his fitness, he’s just been a bit unlucky. That’s not an issue. He had hamstring last year and he’s pulled his thigh this time, so they’re not related.”

As for today’s team for the live Sky game at Peterborough, the Blues boss was still weighing up his options at yesterday’s pre-match press conference: “We’ll have to wait and see what team we play tomorrow. We’re not blessed with great competition for places at centre-half at the minute, so it’s a difficult situation for me.

“I think there are a few players in my thoughts but we can’t just wipe out everybody and make wholesale changes.

“We don’t want to panic, there’s no panic here. We had a horrendous result the other night and centre-halves are a bit thin on the ground.”

Story syndicated from TWTD.co.uk

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