Reading conceded three sloppy first half goals in a 3-2 defeat to Birmingham at St Andrew's. 

Here's every word from manager Paul Ince.

Ince verdict

Mistakes, that’s what it boils down to. It wasn’t just one mistake, it was one after the other, especially the first goal. It’s always a tough place to come to, especially on a cold Friday night, and you can’t concede a goal after 30 seconds, pure madness. You’ve got to give yourself a foothold in the game and we didn’t. But saying that Yak had a chance and should have scored, if that goes in it changes the momentum of the game. When I look at the three goals, it’s not the case of them cutting us open, but it’s just three mistakes, and that’s the frustrating and annoying part. I said to them at half-time, ‘listen, you’ve put yourself in this position, you’ve got to go out there and show some pride’. We’ve got hundreds of fans coming up today in the freezing cold, you’ve got to show some pride and make sure you don’t lose the second half. To be fair to us, we won the second half 2-0, but it’s not good enough, and said to them after the game, you can’t keep making mistakes, you’ll get punished at any level.

Ince on timing of first goal

You can’t let teams get on the front foot when they’re at home and that’s the disappointing thing about it. Naby Sarr’s been out for seven months, Tom McIntyre’s been out for five or six weeks, so it was never about going back to the drawing board because you’re going to make mistakes. The first goal is nothing to do with the centre halves, but if you make a mistake you want someone to come and rectify it, you have to go and save that mistake and we didn’t with the first goal, we made three mistakes, you can’t do that. If you’re making three mistakes in one, you’re gonna get punished. Disappointing, not happy, because I felt before the game it was one we could have won. We’ve played some good stuff, I didn’t think there was much between the two teams, but listen, we’ve come away with 20 shots, which is unlike us. You score two goals away, you expect to win the game, especially after the clean sheet we had against Coventry. But if you’re going to make schoolboy errors like we did today, you’re always going to struggle to win games.

Reading Chronicle:

Ince on mistakes

Spot on. You can't legislate for people doing what they're doing. No manager in the world can do that. If someone wants to do something, and you're scratching your head on why they've done it, you can't do anything about it. You have to just move on. It was disappointing today. I'm not disappointed with the performance because we were probably the better team despite not winning the game, but you get punished for mistakes like that.

Ince on second half

We shouldn’t have to rally. That’s the annoying thing about it. We knew what we get we Deeney and Chong did very well, but we knew what we were getting. We were very well prepared for it, we had nearly a week to prepare for it. We knew what to expect, and most of the time we dealt with it. Second half we showed a bit of pride and a bit of character so that’s a positive. We got the two goals and you’re hoping. If there’s another two minutes, we might have nicked something. On the balance, if you’re going to concede three goals in the first half, you don’t deserve to get anything from it.

Ince on Scott Dann

He's okay. He is going to play again on Monday just to be sure. It doesn’t matter who plays, if you’re making mistakes like that it doesn’t matter who’s at the back.

Ince on penalty

I’ve not seen it so I’m not going to say if it was or not. I didn’t know about the first one because when you see the referee run over to the linesman, I thought had we missed something there? At the end of the day, we let ourselves down defensively, and we can’ afford to do that. if you do that against the better teams you’ll get punished.

Reading Chronicle:

Ince on response

We will go over the game again and look at it. When you make mistakes, there’s nothing you can do better. It’s just a mistake. We will have two or three days to look at it and get on the training ground. We will get a bit of rest because I think we’ve got four games in 12/13 days. We will get some rest but use the next 10-11 days to get on the ground and start getting minutes into the likes of Scott Dann, Naby [Sarr], Tom McIntyre, Hutch. I thought Yids [Yiadom] was very good and Mama [Loum] was very very good today. That was the Mama of old. So, I was pleased with that. I was pleased with the shots we had but ultimately three goals in the first 45 minutes you’re always going to struggle.

Ince on Naby Sarr return

I was always going to start Naby. He needs his minutes, and I don’t think he’ll get the intensity in a Under-21s game. The fact he came through the 90 minutes was a plus, as with Tommy Mac. They’ll get better and stronger. Seven months is a long time. They’ll keep playing, Tom Holmes will come back in and we’ll look stronger as we go forward.