It was a tough night for our Under-18s, with many of the players looking physically and mentally exhausted at The Den following a 1-1 draw with Millwall, as Harrison Murray-Campbell’s opener from a corner was quickly cancelled out, when a slip at the back allowed the home side to equalise.

That resulted in the first side to reach this season’s FA Youth Cup semis being decided by a penalty shootout, the Blues emerging on the losing side after Leo Cardoso saw his effort saved and Michael Golding shot over the bar.

There was obvious disappointment for head coach Hassan Sulaiman as he reflected on the team’s quarter-final exit, not least because of his high hopes for what they could achieve in the competition this season.

‘The natural response is disappointment. The players, the staff, everyone is disappointed,’ he said.

‘I don’t think anyone can hide from that, primarily because when we look at how well the team have done up until this point, it creates expectations.

‘The expectation was definitely for us to get to the final and that was an achievable target.’

That being said, Sulaiman also acknowledges that football can always be full of surprises, and that you can never expect everything to go as you expect or deserve, especially when it comes to youth football with players who are still learning their trade.

‘This is the game that we all love and the game always comes with a little bit of a bumpy road. Things don’t always go the way that you want them to go, but if I’m going to look at it in a development perspective, every game that we have played provides a different challenge.

‘If I think about the Youth Cup run specifically, the first three games that we played, although they were all Category 1 teams, they provided a different challenge to us but in a sense that we knew what we were up against.

‘For example, we knew that when we played against Crystal Palace in the last round they were going to have some spells in possession. And then this game at Millwall in particular, they had a game plan to sit in a mid-block and wait for the right opportunity to jump and press.’

It is the performance of his own players he is focused on, though. The defeat may have eventually come via a penalty shootout, but it was the way the Blues struggled to dictate our usual expansive style of play on the game which he believes cost us at The Den.

‘I wouldn’t even say that Millwall’s block was the problem. What I would say is there were times when we grew a little bit frustrated and we didn’t demonstrate the bravery that we have shown in previous games.

‘What that bravery looked like was our ability to make more entries into their final third, to sustain attacks, to have more efforts at goal, to create better chances of scoring. So we lacked a killer instinct, we lacked the decisiveness in the final third, we lacked a cutting edge to want to compete.

‘However, looking at development as we always do, this is all part of the process of the boys understanding the expectations of playing at the highest level. When you’re playing in competitions like this and especially in the latter rounds, naturally there are going to be some nerves, which the boys had.

‘But we have to rise to the occasion. On this occasion I wouldn’t say that we did that.’

That FA Youth Cup loss now leaves Sulaiman and his team to focus on our Under-18 Premier League campaign. Our bid to finish top of the southern table and secure a place in the play-off final continues with a chance to bounce straight back from this FA Youth Cup defeat when we host Aston Villa on Saturday.