It was an afternoon to forget after the rampant Cottagers scored seven as focus now turns to Saturday’s season finale against Reading, where a victory would guarantee Town’s place in the playoffs.

“It was a real tough day. A real tough game to watch. I haven’t felt like that in my career before if I’m honest, but they are the best team in the league, congratulations to them. They have a fantastic side, the only equivalent I can say is we have nine injuries, nine first-team injuries. If they had nine injuries and went to Man City, that’s the equivalent of the game.

“We have been magnificent, every single thing is going against us in terms of injuries so what we have to do is dust ourselves off and we’re ready to go on the weekend.”

Having suffered two further injuries on the evening, Jones commented on the injury situation once more, adding: “We have people on the bench we couldn’t really bring in. We couldn’t bring on Harry Cornick today and we’ve lost some big players. It boils down to one giant, mammoth, unbelievable game and we would all have taken that at the beginning of the season.

“Let’s look forward to that rather than dwell on a performance, which was a poor performance because they were good, but we weren’t as aggressive as we have been, we didn’t defend our box and in the end, we felt a bit sorry for ourselves.

“Hopefully we’re not too depleted and we go into the game knowing what we need. We know if we get a win we will be in there, a point may do it you never know but we can’t be relying on that.”