“Well that was 90 minutes of my life I’ll never get back” was my first thought as I left Ashton Gate at the final whistle on Saturday.

City and Millwall played out a dreary 0-0 draw in front of 18,230 unfortunate supporters.

The Lions play an ‘industrial’ style of football, I think it’s fair to say. Very physical and effective but not very pleasing on the eye.

Regrettably, they dragged us down to their level and City’s full-backs resorted to launching the ball long as they had done at Brentford a few days earlier.

We saw none of the fast, attacking, passing football that City produced in their first two home games of the season against Barnsley and Plymouth.

The Lions created the better of the chances and could consider themselves unlucky to have not taken all three points.

In that respect, we did well to at least get a point and keep a clean sheet.

But big improvement will be needed if we are to take points off the better teams in this division.

One of those teams, Aston Villa, visit Ashton Gate on Friday in a game that will be shown live on Sky TV (7.45pm). Steve Bruce’s men have just kicked into form in the past couple of games and so a tough test awaits.

On Tuesday evening, City were in Carabao Cup action at Premier League Watford where we achieved a stunning 3-2 victory.

Although the competition seems quite devalued these days due to clubs mostly fielding weakened teams, this was still a very good result against top-flight opposition.

Indeed, City fielded many young players and made nine changes to their previous line-up, whereas Watford only made six.

Two of City’s Academy prospects particularly caught the eye. 18 year old Lloyd Kelly started his first game in a City shirt and played very well at left-back and striker Freddie Hinds, also 18, scored his second long-range goal in this season’s Carabao Cup.

New signing Niclas Eliasson opened his goal scoring account for City with in-form Bobby Reid grabbing the other in what was a productive evening for City.