Ian Holloway admitted David Forde’s howler for Huddersfield’s second goal in today’s 3-1 Den defeat to 10-man Huddersfield had unsettled everybody in the stadium.

Sean Scannell beat the offside trap to volley the Terriers in front after 17 minutes, only for Stefan Maierhofer to restore the parity 11 minutes later following a goalmouth scramble.

Huddersfield were reduced to 10-men early in the second half a Nahki Wells picked up a second yellow card following a challenge on Shaun Williams.

But despite the numerical advantage, Millwall fell behind with quarter of an hour remaining when Forde made a complete hash of Jacob Butterfield’s long range drive and it bounced into the net.

And the visitors went further ahead five minutes from time as Shaun Williams upended Harry Bunn and James Vaughan sent Forde the wrong way from the penalty spot.

When asked if Forde’s error had taken the wind out of Millwall’s sails, Holloway responded: “And the crowd – it just hit everybody, didn’t it.

“Sometimes in football you get some bizarre things.

“We had a decent move going on there, we had two up front and then Gregory has just come on.

“Shaun (Williams) to roll it down the channel and Shaun decided to come out.

“Jimmy Abdou came out to get it and then Jimmy slipped and then we weren’t right.

“For that to happen after that and the shot as it was – it was a shot – but you’ve got long enough to sort something out.

“After that everything went totally wrong – everything.”

Holloway felt that would be harsh on his squad, several of who he felt had delivered some excellent performances.

He said: “That is all people are going to remember and it wasn’t like that – there were lots of good things in that game.

“We’ve made one or two wrong choices at the wrong time ie the first goal.

“Beevers decided to go and try and win that. He possibly shouldn’t have done and they’ve gone on and scored.

“We thought it was offside - it weren’t offside but Beevs should have just stayed with his man.

“Those things seem to be happening at the moment and they are knocking us, but after that we still kept going.”

Holloway added: “We just need to keep faith in what we are trying to do and believe in what we do.

“The group needs to realise ‘hang on, who is going to be a leader now? The only thing that changed when they went down to 10-men was they’ve lost a centre forward, so who has got the space?

“Our two centre halves so what we should have done was just get it, get it out with your feet.

“I’ve put four up front – two strikers, two widemen, pushed my full-backs in so that is 2-4-4. They’ve got two against one back there, put it in there, get your lines right.

“Have we got enough skill yet to go outside of people and do all of that and break people down? It shouldn’t have mattered.

“If we kept putting it in the right areas, they would have cracked and not us.”

Holloway also revealed how the sending off had changed the players’ mentality from a side looking comfortable and firmly in contention to win to one which suddenly felt obliged that it had to.

“Unfortunately they (the players) have all admitted ‘we felt we had to win’ so all of a sudden the team from being OK looked like it became nervous then.

“Then all of a sudden you see the change in the character of it. They’ve just got to come through it, stick to the task and never become the score.

“We became the score when we went 2-1 down as a group.”

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