Jones hails 'patched-up' Bluebirds

Former Aston Villa midfielder Peter Whittingham struck with eight minutes remaining to cancel out Michael O'Connor's first-half opener.The draw came at the end of a difficult week for the Bluebirds, with illness hitting the club, and Jones revealed a number of players put in more of a shift than they had been expecting."After everything that has been going on this week at our club we have to look upon this point as a very good result," declared Jones. "We have had a virus running through the place that has affected a number of our players."We had to patch them up and send them out and I'm proud of the performance they produced."I told two or three of them I would only be asking them to play for an hour - but I fibbed."We started slowly and I'm not sure whether that was down to the effects of the virus or not."We had some luck with our equaliser but in this game you work hard to make your own luck and I thought we did that."It was a 16th goal of the season by the Championship's leading marksman Whittingham that saved the visitors a point when they looked destined for defeat.But his 82nd-minute shot from the edge of the box took a wicked deflection off Scunthorpe centre-back David Mirfin before looping into the back of the net over goalkeeper Josh Lillis.Earlier Scunthorpe had made a flying start with midfield man O'Connor firing them in front after just 11 minutes with a free-kick from the edge of the box.They went on to produce one of their best home performances of the season with some slick passing football and almost made it 2-0 in the 79th minute when leading marksman Gary Hooper had an effort scrambled off the line by Cardiff centre-back Mark Hudson.Scunthorpe manager Nigel Adkins was pleased with his side's performance, saying: "We lost 4-0 at Cardiff on the opening day of the season so this result shows just how far we have developed since then."I thought we played some excellent football in the first half and it was a great finish from O'Connor that put us in front."We are an honest hardworking team who played good football on what was a difficult pitch."We nearly got the second goal we needed with the shot that was cleared off the line and then Cardiff go down the opposite end and equalise with a really lucky deflection."But we can hold our heads up high, this was another good result for us. We're continuing to move in the right direction and we might have had a penalty right at the end when substitute Jonathan Forte went down in the box."The video replay clearly shows that Cardiff goalkeeper David Marshall touched him before he went down."

Source: Team_Talk