Stoke City manager Alex Neil conceded his team were second best in this afternoon's 2-0 defeat at Ipswich Town.

Luke Woolfenden and Kayden Jackson scored in either half to continue the newly-promoted Blues fine start to life back in the Championship.

For the Potters, whose starting XI contained eight summer signings, it was a slight reality check following on from their opening day win against Rotherham.

"Listen, I think the first thing you've got to do is give Ipswich credit," said Neil, who received plenty of stick from a sold out home crowd as a former Norwich manager.

"I thought they were better than us in the game.

"The place was bouncing. I've been in the same scenario as Ipswich are currently in when I was at Sunderland in terms of going into the first home game after promotion. It makes for a great atmosphere.

"The first thing we did was give the ball away cheaply on two separate occasions. The centre-backs passes the ball straight to them, the wide player passes straight to them. What happens is that the crowd gets up when what we needed to do was take the sting out of the game and quieten them.

"They were really brave. They went one-for-one all over the pitch and we lost pretty much every individual duel - whether it be a header or a tackle. You can talk about tactics til the cows come home, but if you don't win individual duels you're going to lose the game. It really is as simple as that.

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"I'm forced to make a change after 30 minutes because at that stage it looked as if Ipswich were going to score another goal.

"That made us better until half-time, because it gave us a better platform to get up the pitch, and I thought we started the second half better. I thought we were good for 10/15 minutes. We had two good chances at the start of that second half - one falls to Ben Pearson, one falls to Wesley, both about 15/16 yards out, but we don't make the best of them. If we scored one of them the game might have looked different.

"Ultimately we didn't though, they wrestled back control of the game, were better for the last 20/25 minutes and got the second goal that mattered."

Neil added: "We didn't do well enough today. I think what you've seen there is a team that has worked together for the last 12 months and a team that has been put together in the last three weeks.

"There were certain times when we were trying to press when we shouldn't be pressing. At throw-in set-ups we were in the wrong position. At times we looked a little bit disoragnised. That doesn't reflect well on me or the team. There's a lot of work to do.

"We've got somebody up top who is six foot three, but we start playing 17 passes along the edge of the 18 yard box, which doesn't really make sense, because at the start of the game we played one or two passes, drew them out, put the ball forward and then played around them. 

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"We very rarely put the ball forward after that, which is frustrating, but in an atmosphere like today it's hard to get any messages onto the pitch. They need to figure it out for themselves on the pitch and that sometimes can prove difficult.

"I've got no complaints today. I thought Ipswich deserved to win and we need to move onto the next one."

He added: "I think you've got to give a lot of credit to Ipswich. We went one-v-one against West Brom in the week and made them look a poor team because they couldn't get out their half. We pressed them and locked us in. I thought Ipswich did that to us today. 

"We struggled at times to get up the pitch. They picked up second balls. When we put it in behind they mopped up. They were very brave in how they played.

"There are very few times when I come in and say we deserved to lose, but today is one of those days."