Kieran McKenna, the manager of Ipswich Town, acknowledges that his team’s performance in the derby against Norwich City was below par.

Ipswich Town boss Kieran McKenna admitted his side didn’t come anywhere near to the level they have hit in earlier games or in Monday’s dramatic 3-2 victory over Southampton in this afternoon’s disappointing 1-0 derby defeat at Norwich City, a match which he didn’t feel was of a particularly high level.

Marcelino Nunez’s 39th-minute free kick proved the winner with the Blues never showing the form which has taken them to the top of the Championship.

“I didn’t think it was our best performance by any means,” McKenna said. “We didn’t hit the level that we would have hoped to in a game that I didn’t think was a very high level, to be honest.

“I didn’t think it was a very good game; in fact, I didn’t believe it was close to the kind of games we’ve played this year, including the one on Monday and the one we played against Norwich earlier in the season.

We didn’t succeed in improving our performance or generating more opportunities today.

“Then the game’s tight, I felt like it was really just a phase of set plays and decisions that went against us in the first half, which ended with them scoring a 30-yard free kick that wins the game.

“Tight games are usually decided by narrow margins, and that can frequently be a set play goal, as that was the case today. Neither side, in my opinion, is playing at the level they have in recent weeks or months.”

Asked whether he had any argument with the foul given against skipper Sam Morsy which led to the goal, McKenna had more of an issue with an earlier decision against Axel Tuanzebe when the defender was adjudged to have brought down Josh Sargent just outside the box.

“The biggest one for me was the free kick against Tuanzebe, that was the more frustrating one because we had a really comfortable first 20 minutes of the game,” he recalled.

“We were in control, we weren’t hitting a fantastic level but the atmosphere was pretty quiet, we were comfortable, we hadn’t given anything away, we were in a decent place in the game.

“And that decision, which I thought was an incorrect one, really lit the crowd, lit the atmosphere and we then had 10 minutes of set play after set play, we couldn’t quite get out of that phase.