Predictable and not good enough in every department – Lions boss Edwards unhappy after QPR defeat

Joe Edwards said his Millwall side were “not good enough in every department” following their 2-0 defeat at QPR today.

The Lions were defeated by their London rivals at Loftus Road thanks to goals either side of the break from Ilias Chair and Sinclair Armstrong.

“Consistency is obviously a big word in football but in this league everyone talks about how unpredictable and crazy the Championship is, ” said Millwall head coach Edwards.

“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 be part of or lead a group where it feels like day in, day out for a period there’s a 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 happens. 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.”

The Lions took off Kevin Nisbet after just 57 minutes. The Scot had just 12 touches as Millwall managed just one shot on target against their lowly opponents who had won just twice at home all season before today.

“The flow of our attacks in recent weeks, Middlesbrough and Leicester, we’ve been ripping through those teams to get to the final third but today we obviously didn’t do that,” said Edwards. “Today was very much a collective problem.

“We talk a lot about this idea that we need to build from the back more – Matty Sarkic is playing short – but we do have ideas of how we vary our game and it’s not this obsession with that 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 to try and set versions of press 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.  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.”

It was a contest that neither team started well but the hosts were very nervous, something that Millwall failed to punish and then got punished for in return.

“From a game that we actually settled very quickly into from the start – QPR didn’t start the game well – it was kind of like they lulled us into a false sense of security,” said Edwards. “We went from five minutes of a steady, comfortable game to not being able to break into any form of intensity – you can’t play in games like that and expect to get anything out of it in that sort of mode.”