Furious Blues boss Alex McLeish claims fans were right to boo his team on Saturday after this surprise home defeat by Championship strugglers.

City were undone by Gary Taylor-Fletcher’s goal two minutes into the second half and produced a thoroughly lacklustre performance, which was met at the end by a loud chorus of jeers from the sizeable home crowd.

McLeish was left fuming by the performance, claiming it simply was not good enough, hinting he may make major changes ahead of City’s next game away to Cardiff on Saturday.

He said: “It was a poor performance and one I’m surprised at. The players know how I feel but they should be feeling terrible as well because we never gave the fans what they wanted.

“If I were a supporter today I’d have booed as well. It just wasn’t good enough. We ran out of ideas, there was no guile, no craft, we lacked quality and that was disappointing.

“We lacked spark and I’ll have to look at whether the edges have come off one or two.

“It opens the door for other players who weren’t involved today because it throws down the gauntlet and you look for players to take it up and say you’ll find it difficult to leave me out.”

The former Scotland manager singled out his side’s poor passing for particular criticism. He thought that was surprising, because it had been the most pleasing aspect of City’s previous match, an impressive 2-1 win over Bristol City.

He said: “It was very much below par. The other night we struck four or five passes together regularly and we penetrated Bristol. Against Blackpool, if we struck three or more together I would need to check the video first.”

McLeish also slammed his side’s slack defending immediately before Taylor-Fletcher scored, branding it “too generous and too slack.”

His defenders appeared to stop as Taylor-Fletcher received the ball on the edge of the box, allowing the midfielder to stroke past Maik Taylor into the bottom right corner of the net.

McLeish said: “You could have driven a London bus through the middle there. Everybody seemed to stop.”

City do remain second though, after Preston were beaten by Wolves.

Blues: Maik Taylor, Kelly, Martin Taylor, Ridgewell, Murphy, Larsson, Carsley, Agustien, McSheffrey, Jerome, McFadden.

Subs: Krysiak, Jaidi, Owusu-Abeyie, Phillips, Bent.