Alan Pardew felt that it was a case of two points dropped as Millwall hit a late equaliser at the Den.

A last gasp Rickie Lambert strike looked to have won it for his side until Liam Trotter snatched a draw with virtually the final kick of the game.

"It's definitely two dropped because I've been in this game long enough to know that you don't have to control a game to win it," he commented afterwards. "For long periods of that game Millwall dominated areas of possession through pressure rather than playing the ball around which caused us problems, but we've got a break and we should have seen it out, so it is two dropped for us.

"Make no bones about it that we're very disappointed about it in the dressing rooms as the fans will be on the way home. It was a committed performance from us and a neutral would probably have said that a draw would have been a fair result.

"I felt that it's a tough place to come, Millwall, they put a lot of pressure on the ball and never really gave us any time and the way to combat that is to have players who can beat their player and I think the only player who did that for us today was Lee Holmes.

"Lee had a terrific first game for me and I was very pleased with his performance, he's worked so hard, he's got quality that we all know but I kept him back because I didn't think he was quite ready.

"He's probably been ready for three or four weeks and I thought he would have started to dip in form if I didn't give him a start. We had three changes to the back four and I thought they were terrific today against a lot of pressure and probably the injury to Dean Hammond affected us a little bit."

The skipper suffered a knock ten minutes before the half time break and the gaffer confirmed that the midfielder is likely to miss some games as a result.

"He's got an achilles knock that might keep him out for a couple of weeks and it's a blow because he's an important player for us.

"There were some good performances throughout the side today though, and to get the goal so late in front of our own supporters, it looked like we'd done what we've threatened to do in a really tight game against one of the top divisions.
We lacked concentration in the last play of the game and gifted them a goal.

"Neither team could really open up the game and play comfortably but I don't think we'll come up against a team who work as hard as them all season if I'm honest so we've had to really, really work hard today but there's a lot of positives - José's debut, Danny and Jon, they all played well, Kelvin was very, very good he made two or three great saves and Lee Holmes coming into the side.

"We're going to need to win 14 of these last 21 games now, so we've got a lot of work in front of us so we're going to need to take every break that comes our way. We've let one go today so we can't let that happen again."