West Ham 2 -1 QPR

Match Report

Queens Park Rangers made a valiant effort to overcome Premier League opposition in the third round of the FA Cup this afternoon, having drawn West Ham away – and if the FA hadn’t scrapped replays, we’d now be looking at a return match at Loftus Road. It was 1-1 at full time, thanks to a fine header from Richard Kone in the 64th minute, but the Irons’ firepower proved too much for us in extra time and the game finished 2-1.

Julien Stéphan promised to put out our best team, not least because over 9,000 tickets had been sold in the away end, our biggest travelling support since the play-off final at Wembley in 2014. But he could hardly do that because of our recent spate of injuries, four of them coming last Sunday. That meant Rumarn Burrell, Kwame Poku, Jonathan Varane and Liam Morrison, not to mention Ilias Chair and Jake Clarke-Salter, weren’t available. Given those constraints, Stéphan probably did pick our strongest starting line-up, save for sticking Joe Walsh in goal in preference to Ben Hamer. In front of him were Amadou Mbengue, Jimmy Dunne, Steve Cook and Rhys Norrington-Davies; our four midfielders were Nicolas Madsen, Isaac Hayden, Karamoko Dembélé and Koki Saito; and our two frontmen were Richard Kone and Rayan Kolli, who’d earned his place after putting two past Sheffield Wednesday.

We looked a bit cowed for the first few minutes, perhaps because the hosts had clearly put out their best team, or maybe because we were overawed to be playing on such a big stage. The London Stadium must be four times larger than Loftus Road – the away goal was almost a football pitch away from where I was sitting and there were people much further back than me. At one point, our fans started chanting “You sold your soul for this shit hole” and it was hard not to feel sorry for the beleaguered home supporters, with the Irons coming into this winless in 10 and seven points adrift. West Ham will struggle to fill this 62,500-seat behemoth if they get relegated. I certainly wouldn’t trade our home ground for a corporate thunderdome of this size.

After 10 minutes or so, we began to settle into the game, having discovered the hosts are quite brittle under pressure. A QPR corner in the 9th minute ended with a Kolli header into the side netting that didn’t look that far away – although it was hard to tell without a telescope. Throughout the first half, the hosts spent far too much time passing it from side to side in the centre of the park, to the increasing irritation of their fans.

Saito was injured in the 16th minute and had to be replaced by Paul Smyth. Let’s hope it’s not serious – we can ill afford to lose another player. Luckily, the Northern Irish international had a good game, snapping at the heels of attacking players, drawing fouls and taking full advantage of the huge space around the pitch when hurling throw-ins into the box.

I was nervous about Walsh, given that the last time he started for us Coventry put seven past him, but he did well this afternoon, making the first of several fine saves in the 32nd minute, getting a fingertip to a strike from Crysencio Summerville and tipping it over the bar. He had to stay on his toes during a succession of corners from Jared Bowen towards the end of the half, each of which needed punching away.

It looked as if we’d go in nil-nil at half time, and the home fans were becoming restless, but the fourth official added nine minutes on account of a West Ham player needing medical attention in the 38th minute, ending with him him being stretchered off in the 45th minute. Annoyingly, the Irons got a goal in 45+10, prompting much outrage among the supporters around me who felt the ref should have blown for half time. It came from their best move of the game up to that point, the first time they really opened us up, with too much space to the right of our goal for their attackers to exploit. Summerville was the scorer.

The second half began much like the first, with the visitors taking a while to settle. But we went up a gear around the 55th minute and started to win more tackles in midfield and string more passes together. Since the international break, there have been spells – sometimes lasting for 45 minutes – in which we suddenly look like a really talented attacking team, able to sustain a high press and making it difficult for teams to play out from the back. In this game, we only managed to be that second team for about 10 minutes and Kone’s goal came at the end of it.

We should have scored in the 61st minute, when Kolli made a great run down the left hand side, took the ball almost to the byline, jinked past a defender and then struck it straight at the keeper instead of cutting it back for Kone who was begging for it in the centre of the box. We attacked again two minutes later, with Smyth forcing a save out of the keeper and winning a corner. Our goal came a minute later, when Dembélé put a lovely cross in and Kone got his head on it, guiding the ball into the top left-hand corner. Cue pandemonium among the 9,000 visiting fans, who’d had to endure a fair amount of taunting from the home support after we went a goal down.

I thought the momentum would be with us after that, but whatever mysterious force had flipped the switch to unleash our A-team 10 minutes earlier, now flipped it back again. Instead, it was the hosts’ turn to go up a gear, and they started peppering our goal with shots. I thought we would surely concede during this spell, but some heroic, backs-to-the-wall defending – and at least two more good saves from Walsh – meant we emerged at the other end with the score still level.

Our players were beginning to tire, having spent so much of the game defending out of possession, and Stéphan made three substitutions in the final 10 minutes, replacing Dembélé with Daniel Bennie, Norrington-Davies with Sam Field and Kolli with Kieran Morgan. None of them had a particularly good game, but, collectively, the team did enough to keep the score at 1-1 by the full time whistle.

During extra time, it became clear that the FA’s new rules favour Premier League clubs. Nuno Espírito Santo had already made three substitutions at this point and made one more in the 111th minute, and it was their strength in depth, in contrast to our dwindling, injury-afflicted squad, that proved decisive. By the time Valentin Castellanos scored their winner in the 98th minute, with the assist provided by Summerville after skipping past Jimmy Dunne, we were running on fumes and didn’t have enough left in the tank to mount a response. It was all we could do to stop them scoring another, although Walsh made two more excellent saves before their goal. The one positive in extra time was that Kealey Adamson, who came on for Mbengue in the 100th minute, looked pretty tidy at right back. Good to know there’s an alternative if our talismanic defender picks up an injury.

So, an honourable defeat and a big improvement on our performance last year, when we also met a Premier League club in the third round of the FA Cup. On that occasion, Leicester beat us 6-1, a humiliation I was glad not to repeat. It was a decent, gritty effort and will do no harm to our morale going into the next game, which is away to Stoke on Saturday. It helps that expectations were low, given that we have the worst FA Cup record in the league. If we are going to go out in the third round, as we nearly always do, better to do it to a Premier League side than a team in League One.

You can watch the highlights on BBC iPlayer here.