Cardiff boss Omer Riza hailed his side’s character after their dramatic 4-2 penalty shootout victory over Stoke in the fourth round of the FA Cup.
The thrilling tie ended 3-3 in normal time after Lewis Koumas scored twice in four minutes, either side of the break, to cancel out Ruben Colwill and Yousef Salech.
Stoke, from 2-0 down, led 3-2 through Lewis Baker’s penalty before Colwill’s second.
After a more sedate half an hour of extra-time, Ethan Horvath saved Michael Rose’s spot kick before Colwill scored the winning penalty to send the 1927 winners into the fifth round for the first time for 11 years.
Proud Riza said: “Ruben’s been excellent today. He worked really hard off the ball as well.
“We showed really good character and togetherness. It’s really important we show that going forward. I said to the boys that this can elevate us even more if we keep showing that character and togetherness.
“I’m really happy to be in the fifth round. I’m really pleased with the boys.
“We made hard work of it in the end. There was cramp and fatigue setting in among the players towards the end.
“They showed great character to get back into the game after being 2-0 down to be fair to them.
“We gave them a lifeline just before half-time to go in 2-1. The start to the second half wasn’t quite good enough and we were punished for it.
“The boys showed great character from 3-2 down and win the game so that was satisfying.”
Mark Robins was disappointed after his side did the hard work to turn the game around but admitted they will “take it on the chin”.
He said: “In a game you can’t give goals away like we did. They were really poor goals to give away. They’ve not really had to work for anything whereas with ours we had to work for every one of them.
“While we went 2-0 down, we kept plugging away and showed some really good character. That’s the first thing but can we please just make sure we play properly from the start and not give those chances away.
“They continued to get chances because it became a basketball game and that was a disappointing thing, going away from what we’ve been doing in the league games. It’s a cup tie but the mentality should be exactly the same, it shouldn’t be any different.
“We concede two goals but get back into it with three really good goals to be fair, two from Lewis Koumas and a well-taken penalty from Lewis Baker and we get our noses in front. Then we contrive to concede another goal which was really, really disappointing.
“There is some good play in there amongst it but we scored three goals, conceded three goals. I’ll take the goals we scored as a positive, the goals we conceded were poor, but we’ve got to move on from the game as quickly as we possibly can do.
“It’s disappointing to go out and once it gets to a penalty shootout it’s a test of nerve, skill. We started off ok with that but it went against us.
“I’m disappointed but we take it on the chin.”
