It was written in the stars: Golden boy Eberechi Eze returns to Loftus Road and scores the winner in the 64th minute to knock QPR out of the Carabao Cup. The players must have felt this too, because the fight seemed to go out of them after that, bar a stupendous effort from Alfie Lloyd in the 91st minute. Overall, we gave a good account of ourselves, but we never looked like winning, not least because Crystal Palace put out a full-strength team and we didn’t.
Martí Cifuentes made six changes going into this game, replacing Paul Nardi with Joe Walsh, Hevertton Santos with Harrison Ashby, Jimmy Dunne with Sam Field at Centre Back, Jonathan Varane coming in to replace Sam Field as a defensive midfielder, Elijah Dixon-Bonner playing alongside him, and Paul Smyth starting as part of the attacking trio instead of Karamoko Dembélé. Koki Saito came in on the left, with Nicholas Madsen shuffling along to the No.10 position and Lucas Andersen confined to the bench. That meant the gaffer set them up in a 4-2-3-1 formation as follows: Walsh in goal; Ashby, Steve Cook, Field and Kenneth Paal as the back four; Varane and Dixon-Bonner in defensive midfield; Smyth, Madsen and Saito in attacking midfield; and Zan Celar up front.
We looked a bit shellshocked by the speed and precision of the opponents from the get-go, with the first decent chance of the game falling to Eze – who else? – and Eddie Nketiah scoring from a tight angle on the right-hand side of the box in the 16th minute.
At that point, I began to fear Palace might run rampant, having beaten Norwich 4-0 in the second round of the same competition. But we settled after that and even though we only had one shot in the first half (to their five), Varane did a decent job in midfield, Saito looked lively on the left and Ashby, making his debut at right back, showed flashes of brilliance. Keeping the deficit down to one goal at half time wasn’t too shabby, given the mismatch in quality, and if we could up our game in the second half, as we usually do, we might just ambush our opponents.
At the beginning of the second half, Cifuentes yanked Dixon-Bonner and brought on Dembélé, making him the CAM and moving Madsen down to replace Dixon-Bonner. We immediately carried more threat, with Smyth coming close in the 52nd minute after he got on the end of a cross from Madsen and right-footed it into the top right-hand corner, forcing an acrobatic save out of Dean Henderson. That was more like it.
We scored from the resulting corner, with Sam Field striking from the centre of the box and sending the ball into the roof of the net. That’s Field’s fifth goal in 38 appearances under Cifuentes, with all five arriving in his last 18 games, compared to just four in his previous 110 before Cifuentes’s arrival (h/t Jack Supple). And this time he was playing as a centre back!
But we seem to be better at coming from behind and equalising this season than we are at winning games. For about 10 minutes after Field’s goal, we actually looked better than the Eagles, putting together a succession of fluid attacking moves. This, you felt, is how Cifuentes wants us to play – Saito, Dembélé and Smyth looked the business.
But the wind left our sails when Eze picked up the ball on the left-hand side in the 64th minute, glided past a couple of defenders in that extraordinary way he has, jinked to the right and got off a long-range shot. Walsh had it covered, but the ball hit Cook on its way to the goal and sailed into the back of the net. Would he celebrate? The answer is yes, but only in a muted way.
After that, as I say, the visitors dominated. Cifuentes tried to inject a bit of life into the team by replacing Ashby with Lloyd and Saito with Santos in the 68th minute, but the closest we came to scoring before the 90 had elapsed was an attempted header by Celar that was across the goal instead of into it. Andersen came on for Smyth and Dunne for Madsen in the 81st minute, but we still couldn’t shift the momentum.
Then, for one heart-stopping moment, it looked as though the game might go to penalties after all. Lloyd’s never-say-die attitude, which enabled him to get the 96th minute equaliser at Hillsborough on Saturday, was on full display in the 91st minute when he picked up a long ball from Walsh in the final third, let it bounce in front of him, trapped it on his chest, then got off a powerful strike that was so close to the left-hand post it might have touched it. A good sign, I thought, that his first goal has given him a confidence boost. More like that please Alfie.
So, a disappointment, but with plenty of positives to take into the next game against Millwall on Saturday, where, I imagine, we’ll be at full strength.
You can watch the highlights on EFL’s YouTube channel here.