Gary Rowett: My Millwall side didn’t handle the pressure today of chasing a play-off place

Championship play-off pressure as they saw their top-six hopes dashed at QPR today.

The Lions lost 4-3 in an incident-packed match in west London.

It means that the South Londoners can no longer catch Cardiff City, who won 3-1 at Middlesbrough.

“I certainly wouldn’t describe it as a great game of football,” said Rowett.

“It’s disappointing. I could easily stand here and say we’ve come so far and done so well, that I’m so proud of what we’ve achieved. But that’s not me. I’m disappointed when the pressure came on we’ve not managed to step up and handle it very well. We did the same against Middlesbrough – we didn’t perform. It was the same today.

“We didn’t start well. I just felt that for the first time defensively we looked very vulnerable and didn’t do our jobs one-versus-one.

“We conceded a set-piece. I mean no disrespect to QPR but they are not a side we should be conceding a set-piece against.

“We get back to 101 very, very quickly and then again it is disappointing with the second goal. It’s a poor goal for us to concede. I’m sure Bart [Bialkowski] will be a little bit disappointed with it. It knocked the stuffing out of us a little.

“We caused them a lot of problems when we got the ball in the box. We have come away from home and scored three goals and there was an offside towards the end that wasn’t an offside – but I won’t go into too much detail on that because a draw didn’t mean that much to us.

“We could’ve scored five or six but QPR could have scored eight or nine. It’s not the sort of game you need at this stage of the season. We knew the Cardiff score at half-time and knew a draw was no good for us. We had to take risks and unfortunately the risks didn’t pay off.”