Coventry City manager Tony Mowbray has said he is not going to make excuses for the Sky Blues 2-1 FA Cup exit to Northampton Town.
Mowbray told the Coventry Telegraph: “For various reasons there were what I would call eight first-team footballers unavailable – nine when the goalkeeper got injured in the warm-up but I’m not going to stand here making excuses because we had a reasonably strong side out there.
“Ultimately our inability to defend crosses was our downfall and that’s frustrating because we spent all week working on that. I don’t think they caused us any other problems but the first two balls they put into our box resulted in goals.
“As we’ve been saying for a few weeks, Reda Johnson is a huge miss for this football club and we’re finding it very tough to find the right player to fill that gap. I don’t think the goals we conceded today would have gone in with a dominant centre-half who wants to head the ball in the centre of our defence and the search goes on to find some defensive help.
“It’s obviously disappointing because we’re out of the FA Cup and we had hoped to progress.
“We had all the ball in the second half but although I thought Jacob Murphy was fantastic today we missed that little bit extra that Adam Armstrong and Ryan Kent can provide.
"We weren’t potent enough – we didn’t create enough action with the possession we had; there wasn’t enough happening in their 18-yard box.
“They didn’t really come out in the second half but it was only really Murphy going past them when normally it’s two or three doing that off different angles.”