Gary Rowett delighted as Millwall see off promotion-chasing QPR at The Den

Posted Wednesday, February 16, 2022 by PA

Millwall manager Gary Rowett was beaming over his side’s performance after they defeated promotion-chasing QPR with a 2-0 Championship victory at The Den.

Goals from Mason Bennett and Tyler Burey – his first senior strike for the Lions – guided the hosts to their second win in four days after a game they controlled from start to finish.

For fourth-placed QPR, however, this was another concerning display, following their shock narrow defeat at Barnsley on Saturday and they remain six points adrift of second-placed Bournemouth in the league table.

Rowett said: “I think that’s probably as good a performance, overall, that my team has put on since I’ve been here, against a very good QPR side who we’ve found very hard to beat in recent years.

“They’re a talented team, they keep the ball well, they make it difficult for you to press them and they’ve got very good creative forward players.

“We really stifled that tonight and I thought, in open play, I can’t really remember them creating too many chances.

“I thought we had most of the big chances tonight and I’m a little bit disappointed, in some ways, that we didn’t win by more than two goals.

“We could have scored after two minutes and there were a couple more after that, but there were some big performances tonight.

“The only frustration is we seem to count the cost after every single game – Ollie Burke felt his hamstring which is just incredibly disappointing.”

A wonderful move led to Millwall opening the scoring three minutes into the second half as Jed Wallace picked out Scott Malone, who squared the ball first time for Bennett to sidefoot in.

Wallace was the creator of the Lions’ second as well as his backheel allowed Burey to run into the area before bending in an excellent finish after 64 minutes.

QPR boss Mark Warburton said: “The message before the game was we’ve got a lot of respect for Gary’s teams and Millwall.

“They win duels, they win challenges, they put balls into your box, they’ve got guys coming in there with good delivery and you’ve got to do the basics really well.

“I thought we started off OK for the first 15 minutes but then started to lose one or two duels and challenges.

“We gave away soft free-kicks. The ball starts coming into your box and they get a foothold in the game.

“We just didn’t do the basics well enough tonight.

“The fact is we didn’t move the ball as well as we could do. We didn’t have the quality of the ball coming into the box as we normally do.

“Did we do enough to win the game? I don’t think we did tonight.”