Lee Johnson admitted Lyle Taylor and Macauley Bonne caused his Bristol City side problems and rued the defensive errors they made in their 3-2 defeat to Charlton on Boxing Day.

Bonne edged the hosts ahead when he raced onto Albie Morgan’s through ball to lob the goalkeeper from just outside the box shortly before half-time.

But it took City just 41 seconds to level the scores after half-time, when Andreas Weimann nodded home substitute Niclas Eliasson’s inviting cross, before Eliasson made it 2-1 on the hour mark.

Charlton were down but not out, and after Bonne muscled off Tomas Kalas to fire in the equaliser he then saw youngster Alfie Doughty race beyond Taylor Moore to force home his driven cross at the far post for 3-2.

Johnson believes City got themselves “into a great position after a difficult first half” but he was ultimately left disappointed by the goals his team conceded.

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He said: “I think that today, if you look at the goals, if you look the goals back with a coaching eye on, you'd be disappointed in the individual errors.

“We made two substitutions [bringing on Eliasson and Jay Dasilva at half-time] and it gave us a boost and an instant reaction, if you like, with Niclas’ great ball and Andy’s movement across the near post, so I was really pleased with that goal.

“I thought, second half, we showed what we were about and there were positives for sure from our attacking play. But it's difficult when you make errors like we have for the three goals, and it's not individual errors in terms of giving the ball away square and somebody running onto it and scoring, it's the bits that we work on in training.

“The fundamentals, if you like, of defending that we failed to execute today.”

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Asked why City struggled to get going in the opening exchanges, Johnson added: “I thought we had a couple of good possession patches in the first half but I thought their front two [Macauley Bonne and Lyle Taylor] caused us problems, to be honest.

“Physically, they bumped us, they bruised us, they moved us about and we just had to make sure that we stuck in it.

“It's fine margins, you know? Charlton will obviously be very happy with that today, and rightly so, but it's disappointing for us given the fact that we were relatively comfortable.

“If you could rewind time back to 70 minutes [then] obviously we should have seen that out.”