Millwall manager Gary Rowett has conceded that Wigan Athletic wanted to win more in his side's 1-0 defeat at the DW Stadium on Saturday afternoon.

Shaun Hutchinson's own goal, which saw the defender divert a cross from Anthony Pilkington into his own net 12 minutes into the second half, was enough to secure a big three points for Wigan in their battle for survival, and deal Millwall's play-off hopes a damaging blow.

But despite going into this game with the chance of further closing the gaps to the play-offs, it seems Rowett was rather disappointed by the intent shown by his side in the first hour of the game in particular.

Speaking about his side's performance after the match, the Millwall manager was quoted by Wigan Today as saying: "It looked like Wigan were more desperate to win than we were. And that's the biggest frustration for me.

"Sometimes you have to take a game by the scruff of the neck at places like Wigan. But we looked like we were waiting for things to happen. You saw what happened when we started chasing the game in the last half an hour.

"We looked like we really wanted to get back into the game, we started taking people on. My question to the players would be why didn't we do that for the first 60 minutes."

It seems that one element of disappointment about the result and performance for Rowett, is how it compared to recent impressive outings against two of their play-off rivals, as he continued: "It's a feeling of a disappointment really, on the back of two good performances against Fulham and Preston. We seem to be able to lift our game for the teams at the upper end of the division.

"But we don't seem to have that same mentality for these kinds of games. And that's very disappointing for me as manager. In the first half, I'm just waiting for our performance to get started.

"The major disappointment for me is we just didn't really ever get going."

Following that defeat to Wigan, Millwall are now 11th in the Championship, seven points adrift of the play-offs ahead of Birmingham and Bristol City to The Den later this week.

The Verdict

This will rightly be a concern for those associated with Millwall.

With the Lions needing as many points as possible to keep their hopes of a top-six spot alive, they should have needed very little motivation for a game such as this.

Indeed, given their recent promising results, and Wigan's own precarious position, Millwall ought to have been coming into this game with the confidence to go and get all three points, which does seem to make this something of a missed opportunity.

One minor positive about this for Rowett and co. is that with two more games to come this week, they do at least have the opportunity to put things right quickly.