But Connacht may have paid a far heavier price in terms of injuries, losing Craig Ronaldson, Ian Porter, Kieran Marmion, Quinn Roux and Eoin McKeon early in the game.
Connacht played nearly half of the match in Wales without a recognised scrum half, and Lam knows they will have their work cut out in the coming weeks with a European double-header looming.
"It was a disappointing outcome; more in the sense of injuries," Lam told RTE.
"We took some pretty big knocks, so I'm proud of the way the guys hung in there. When you lose your two scrum halves after 42 minutes it means a bit of readjustment.
"It looks like Quinn might have broken something down around the ankle. It's a worry for sure; we came into this game with Cardiff with 16 injuries and it looks like now that we're going to be adding to that list.
"We didn't want to get into a dog-fight, but we brought it on ourselves by not being clinical enough earlier on.
"We knew if we could keep the ball we could put pressure on them, but at times our execution wasn't just right and we tried to force the pass when it wasn't on.
"We knew on that pitch, which is pretty tough, we needed to hold the ball and be clinical. We did that at times, but we coughed the ball up at others."
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