Frustrated Barry-Murphy backs 'human' squad after draw

Cardiff City head coach Brian Barry-Murphy hailed his side's performance at Wycombe Wanderers as "exhilarating at times" despite returning from Adams Park with just one point.

The former Manchester City and Leicester City coach admitted to some frustration after seeing his side create plenty of scoring opportunities in the New Year's Day 1-1 draw but said his players were only "human".

The result saw Cardiff maintain their three-point lead at the top of League One with a side showing six changes as Barry-Murphy sought to keep his side "fresh and ready" over the demanding festive period.

"I can't really ask any more from the players apart from obviously wanting to score the goals that we feel we deserve," he said after the draw with 13th-placed Wanderers.

"We've been so dominant in the game and created so many good chances, chances we would normally take.

"[At Wycombe] we just couldn't and I'm very pleased with large parts of the performance again.

"We went to Lincoln and Bolton, places like that, and produced what we thought were OK performances but didn't create enough chances.

"We produced a lot of chances [against Wycombe] and some of our play was exhilarating at times. Overall very pleased with the performance while naturally wanting to have a bit more and score the goals."

Ronan Kpakio, Dylan Lawlor, Joel Colwill, Alex Robertson and Omari Kellyman all returned to the Bluebirds' starting XI at Adams Park, along with Gabriel Osho, who had been absent since the start of December when he dislocated a toe.

And Barry-Murphy was delighted with the performance of centre-back Osho (pictured above), who has had limited playing time since his £1m move from Auxerre in the summer.

"Brilliant performance, very happy to get him back involved and I think more than anything he wants to show his team-mates and his supporters what he can do. I think you saw clear signs of what he's going to bring to our team when he's fully fit," he added.

"He's only had a few days' training so he was pretty fatigued when he came off. We made a lot of changes because we wanted to produce a really energetic and highly dynamic performance for our supporters who travelled in such numbers, and we did."

Barry-Murphy is now expecting to make further changes for Sunday's home game with Wigan (15:00 GMT).

"I think we have such a young squad and they've never been through this type of schedule before so, you know, all the players we feel have such ability that we can play any player in any position, any stage," he said.

"It's not rotating for the sake of it because we believe in the players so much and as such we have to reflect that on the teams we pick."