West Brom head coach Tony Mowbray is demanding more from his players away from home after they held on for a point in a 1-1 draw at Millwall.
The Baggies gratefully left The Den with a point after Joe Bryan’s own goal – his second this week – cancelled out Jake Cooper’s opener for the Lions, who spurned a succession of chances in the second half.
It kept West Brom sixth in the Sky Bet Championship, but they have still not won on their travels since November and their poor away form has prevented them from moving away from the teams chasing them.
Just one point now separates them from seventh-placed Coventry and Mowbray was frustrated with the lack of control they were able to impose on the game in south London.
He said: “We’ve got John Swift, we’ve got Jed Wallace, we’ve got Adam Armstrong and we’ve got some really talented footballers – we didn’t play Mikey Johnston, Tom Fellows came on today.
“They are exceptionally talented individuals who are very good with the ball, (but) sometimes you come here and you get dragged into a fight because if you don’t fight, you’re going to get beat.
“Sometimes you can become overly engrossed in that competitive edge of a game and you forget to play the game that you should be playing.
“I’ve said that to the team, but I’m happy we didn’t lose a football match we could easily have lost because of their intensity and the crowd gets wrapped up in the game.
“It’s very tough to come here but I do believe, moving forward, with the players that we’ve got we should be able to come here and dominate more, and they’ll be happy to take a point because they didn’t get much of a kick.”
Millwall took a deserved lead after 19 minutes when Femi Azeez’s cross found Cooper and the skipper found the net with a towering header across Joe Wildsmith.
However, West Brom equalised in bizarre fashion seven minutes later when Darnell Furlong’s cross came off Bryan and trickled into the bottom corner.
Grady Diangana almost completed a rapid turnaround for the visitors when his deflected shot rattled the underside of the crossbar.
Baggies goalkeeper Wildsmith then shone in the second half as he kept out headers by Cooper and Japhet Tanganga soon after the restart before denying Millwall substitute Camiel Neghli in the closing stages.
Millwall boss Alex Neil said: “I thought we started the game really well, I thought we deserved our goal, but there was just that five-minute spell.
“It starts with a free-kick we put straight in the keeper’s hands, they break down the right, we don’t cover the space which we should do and we end up bundling the ball into our own net.
“You could probably see there was a little bit of a lack of confidence at that point – the crowd started to groan a little bit in the fact that they see what we see, which is ‘what have you just done?’
“You’ve let the game drift when you don’t need to, so that was the frustration.
“I asked them to go out second half and make sure we try and fix it and try and play as well as you did do for large parts of the first half, and I thought they did and probably even more.”
