Team Sky had hoped to save a disappointing spring classics campaign in today's Paris-Roubaix but Bernhard Eisel's 12th ended up being the team's best result. After the race, the team admitted that it didn't have the legs to follow the best.

Team Sky had big ambitions for this year's cobbled classics and had a special training camp on Tenerife for the teams classics squad during the month of March. However, the team has struggled to be a protagonist in the biggest races, and despite the team dominating the stage races this year, the team had failed to step onto the podium in the big one-day races.

When Juan Antonio Flecha (Vacansoleil) made the 13-man selection, the team were only represented by a strong Bernhard Eisel and when the group later split up, the Austrian was at the back. He ended up being caught by the group of chasers and had to sprint for 9th on the velodrome in Roubaix.

Sports director Servais Knaven had no excuses for the team's performance.

“On the tough section where the race split apart it was all about the legs and we didn’t quite have the strength to be there," he said. "Bernie (Eisel, ed.) was up there but of course we hoped for more."

However, the team also had its fair share of bad luck. Ian Stannard had an early puncture and crashed when he tried to rejoin the peloton, and one of the team's pre-race captains Geraint Thomas took a tumble after also hitting the deck in the Milan-Sanremo and the Tour of Flanders.

“Ian used up a lot of energy after his early puncture and then his crash," Knaven explained. "Geraint also crashed and couldn’t get back so again we had some bad luck. Up until that point we had been racing really well with Mathew (Hayman, ed.) in the break. We did a lot of things right, we just didn’t have the legs to finish it off.”

With the cobbled season now behind us, the team hopes to perform better in the Ardennes classics where the Colombian duo of Rigoberto Uran and Sergio Henao are expected to lead the team.