Danny Wilson paid tribute to his battered Cardiff Blues following a "brutal" defeat to Stade Francais in their European Champions Cup play-off.
The Blues were ravaged by injury from start to finish and lost seven players in total at Stade Jean Bouin.
That severely dented their efforts, despite a bright start, with Tom James pulling up before kick-off and then Rhun Williams, Rey Lee-Lo, Steve Shingler, Willis Halaholo, Matthew Rees and Kirby Myhill suffering a similar fate.
Wilson admits his side were unable to cope with the major disruption but he was proud of their unrelenting effort.
The Cardiff Blues head coach said: “It’s been a long-hard season and that was certainly a brutal way to end it in terms of injuries – come the end we had a back-row in the centre, a scrum-half on the wing and had run out of backs.
“I’ve never seen anything like that as a coach. We lost one in the warm-up, one in the first minute, then Rey nine minutes later.
“So 10 minutes into the game and we’ve lost three players from our selected team. Then it just carries on, Shingler comes on and gets injured straight away in the centre, we were pretty decimated by the end.
“But that’s the game - it can be a brutal game and it certainly was today. We scored some good tries, played some good rugby but ultimately we didn’t have enough firepower to deal with what Stade had, their bench added dramatically, while we were trying to patch up severe injuries.
“Credit to the players this season, they’ve worked extremely hard and again they showed some of the attacking rugby we can play and at times defended well but ultimately we came up short.”
Reflecting on the season on a whole, Wilson has pin-pointed consistency and squad depth as the key areas on focus.
The Blues won more Guinness PRO12 matches than last season but could not improve on a seventh-place finish and reached the quarter-finals of the European Challenge Cup.
He added: “We started the season very well, finished it well and there was a patch in the middle where we struggled in the league but Europe was good to us.
“There was a drop in form at that time but perhaps a drop in personnel as well and that’s something we have to improve.
“We finished seventh and seventh next year will qualify us for the Champions Cup, we qualified for a for a Challenge Cup quarter-final as well so we have made some small steps in the right direction but we have to build some depth.”