"I'm still smarting from the criticism we are getting back home," he said. "But what do you do?
"Do you lie down and take it or do you come out fighting? I thought my players came out fighting tonight."
He continued, "They can feel very proud of themselves that they've come here and not let anybody down. That to me is the most important thing.
"We've just fallen short but there's plenty of teams who will come here and take bigger beatings than a 2-1.
"We're still disappointed though. All I have heard this week is that we had nothing to lose, but we had a game to lose.
"We can have all the pride in the world but at the end of the day I'm just as gutted to lose here as I would be anywhere else.
"We had half a chance and with a bit more luck we might have come away with something."
"There's lessons for us to learn in this game," he said.
"But we won't come up against teams like Liverpool every week and what we have shown here is that if we play with desire and commitment and keep believing, then things will get better.
"Now we have to forget this game, learn from it and put it back into our league form.
"This will have no bearing whatsoever on our league form, except for one thing. We've come here, matched them in a lot of departments and if the players are not confident after this performance, then when will they be."
He added, "Moral has never been low. People assume it is but it's actually quite high in the camp.
"I think you have seen that today because if we had come here without it, we wouldn't have put in a performance like that.
"We now need to take that level of performance back into our league campaign."
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"The first half we were playing well but we couldn't score," he said.
"Cardiff were working very hard though, especially towards the end of the first half.
"We then did well in the second half but conceded from a free-kick and they gave us a fright in the last 10 minutes.
"We knew they were good from set-pieces and it put us under pressure."
He added, "I wished Robbie all the best at the end. I have very good memories of his time here. He was a great player for us and a good example to the others."