Head Coach Paul Warne pulled no punches in his verdict following Derby County’s 2-0 home defeat to Blackpool in Round One of the Carabao Cup on Tuesday evening.


The Rams exited the competition at the first hurdle with the loss to two first half goals and Warne says it was no less than the side deserved on the night.

Speaking to RamsTV after the contest, the Head Coach gave his reflections on the evening.


On the game...

We were second best on everything and got beat by a much better team.

We got outplayed, outfought, out-tackled and out-ran. We played the same shape as them but it didn't look like it.

It's my job to motivate the lads prior to a game but we looked undercooked and out of sorts.


We got out ran and outnumbered in the midfield so as bad a performance as you can get, we got it in the first half. The first half was disgusting and rightfully so we got booed off. I've never managed a team that have got booed off at half-time before but I'd have been entitled to start the boos myself.

I wasn't best pleased but in fairness none of the players are best pleased either. Nobody wants to underperform.

I apologise to the fans who did kindly turned up and the ones who stayed behind and did kindly clap them off, I have massive respect for that because I don't think the performance merited it.


On whether the performance surprised him...

I try not to sugar-coat things when I talk to the press. I try and be honest.

It's my fault, I'm not saying I'm blameless but with the team we picked I thought we'd have a lot more comfort in the game.

There are loads of things we need to work on because we go into a tough League One game on Saturday at Burton Albion and we need to right a lot of wrongs.

There's a lot of discussions we need to have as coaches to put it right for Saturday and that's our job.


On what he said to the players at half-time and full-time...

I said at half-time that it was an embarrassing performance.

Credit to Blackpool. They looked organised, quick, fit and we didn't and that's the honest truth and I told them that.

I thanked them for the efforts in the second half but fundamentally we never looked like scoring.

I'm not going to say we played really well. We have to be significantly better, the coaches have to be better, we all have to be better to get the level of performance to take on Burton on Saturday because that sort of level of performance is not what we expect