JOE Edwards was left frustrated with Millwall’s surprise shortcomings as the Lions fell to a limp defeat to Queens Park Rangers.
Goals from Ilias Chair and Sinclair Armstrong saw the Hoops win for the first time in eight against a Millwall side that struggled to ever get going at Loftus Road.
QPR outfought a Lions side that had really shown their potential in recent weeks, even in defeats to Leicester City and Middlesbrough.
But few of a Millwall persuasion could pick too many positives from this game, not least the head coach.
Speaking after the game, Edwards said: “Consistency is obviously a big word in football in general but in this league [especially], everyone talks about how unpredictable and crazy the Championship is. Spectators talk about it in a good way as it makes it exciting but when you’re part of it, it can make it really frustrating. You can lead a group where it feels like day in, day out there’s a lot of lot of good work going on with performances and signs that we’re building.
“Today, out of nowhere, you just have a performance like that where in pretty much every department of the game we just weren’t good enough really. Incredibly frustrating particularly on the day it comes on. You never want those bad games or play like that but I and the players are well aware of what this fixture is to our fans.
“We knew what we were up against in a tricky opponent who are in a difficult position so the game is there for us if we want, as a team who are clearly in a better place than them at the moment. But that makes them dangerous because at some point they really need to come out fighting as they did in the second half in particular and we couldn’t match it today, and it’s incredibly frustrating.”
Kevin Nisbet fired over at the end of the first half before Billy Mitchell had an effort cleared off the line in the second half in what were Millwall’s only two real chances in the game.
On his side’s struggles going forward, Edwards said: “The flow of our attacks in recent weeks, Middlesbrough and Leicester, we’ve been ripping through those teams to get to the final third. Today we obviously didn’t do that. Today was very much a collective problem.
“We talk a lot about this idea that we need to build from the back more but we do have ideas of how we vary our game and it’s not this obsession with we have to play short and make 50 passes the length of the pitch. Today we became predictable, very early on, and I’m not sure why as we spoke about that and we know that teams will be seeing what we’ve been doing and will come up with traps or versions of pressing that might make it look different for us.
“We worked on different solutions and we got out on the pitch and we either got the decision wrong or, when the ball did get around the halfway line or around the final third, we were unable to hold it up or sustain any momentum. It became one of those days.
“And it was the polar opposite of what you were seeing up the other end of the pitch. QPR were playing very little football in their build-up but every time it went into [Lyndon] Dykes or Armstrong, it was ping, hold it up, link it up and they fed off that. And they grew into the game whereas we got stuck in our half and played predictable football, which is absolutely not our plan.”
Asked about QPR potentially analysing Millwall’s recent performances and neutralising them, Edwards added: “For sure teams do their homework but we know we can’t expect to play the same football every week and it just works perfectly. We have to have more answers than we did today.
“And sometimes that is just moments of individual quality. Because the way we’ve been playing lately, people have been giving us credit for our performances, I’ll happily give a lot of that credit to the players. A lot of players have been in good form where they weren’t in early December. There’s been players that for four or five games now – I could reel through a list – have been playing really well with their quality of passing the ball through the line or holding the play up or linking it… today there’s not many players in our team that could probably get on the bus and say they’re happy with their performance.”
Mitchell’s chance was cleared off the line by QPR defender Reggie Cannon, who was then allegedly struck by a bottle thrown from the away end.
On the incident, Edwards said: “I was talking to Andy Myers, I saw the stewards come round so I knew an incident had happened, but I haven’t seen what happened. But obviously if something has been thrown onto the pitch or in the direction if the players that is something we can’t condone.”
Similar claims of objects being thrown onto the pitch were also made during the meeting between Millwall and QPR on Boxing Day last year, when Matija Sarkic and a linesman were both allegedly struck.