Hammers have too much firepower for weary Wolves

Wolves 1 West Ham 3

Brian Deane, Marlon Harewood and David Connolly bagged a goal apiece before the interval to see the Division One Hammers safely into Monday’s fifth-round draw at the expense of their Barclaycard Premiership hosts.

Vio Ganea was the player on target for Wolves but the Romanian’s first goal in English football served as scant consolation for the Black Country club. Pardew is beginning to suspect this year’s FA Cup might have the Hammers’ name on it.

United’s 1-0 Cup final victory over Arsenal in 1980 was the last occasion a side from outside the top flight won the world’s oldest knockout competition.

The Upton Park supremo said: “It’s going to be a difficult call for us to win it but you approach every tournament with a belief you can win it and not to make up the numbers.

“No-one could fault us today because we played really well and thoroughly deserved our place in the next round.

“People keep talking about 1980 and all that but I wouldn’t say it was a millstone around my neck or anything like that. But there’s a tradition about us and hopefully the fifth-round draw will be kind to us and get us a home tie.

“There’s a buzz about the place at the moment, training’s double lively and all the players who went out there today were determined to do well.”

Pardew’s managerial counterpart Dave Jones believes defeat was the price Wolves were forced to pay following Premiership exertions against big guns Manchester United and Liverpool.

Their Cup clash with the Hammers was Wolves’ third outing in eight days and came on the back of a 1-0 home victory over Manchester United and the 1-1 midweek draw with Liverpool.

Jones took the opportunity to leave out Alex Rae and Denis Irwin, who he later revealed had both complained of hip problems on Saturday, as well as leave out the leg-weary Jody Craddock and Steffen Iversen while Shaun Newton was sidelined by ankle and hamstring injuries.

And Jones confirmed more changes would have been made had he been able to call on a bigger squad.

He said: “If I’d had more players around me I’d perhaps have made more changes than I did.

“This was always going to be a difficult tie whether we’d had those games against Manchester United and Liverpool or not had them but we were still very dull and lethargic and you could see our brightest players were those who were the freshest.

“I took the opportunity to rest a few but I still felt I’d picked a team to get a result because we wanted to go through but I felt it was one game too many for some of our players and it was a game played on a heavy pitch too.

“To lose any game is bad but I was annoyed with the way we conceded the goals and the lads are disappointed not to have gone through.”

WOLVERHAMPTON: Oakes, Luzhny (Craddock 45), Butler, Clyde, Naylor, Silas (Gudjonsson 66), Ince, Cameron, Kennedy, Miller (Clarke 59), Ganea.

WEST HAM: Bywater, Ferdinand (Quinn 82), Harley, Dailly, Mullins, Harewood, Etherington, Horlock, Carrick, Deane, Connolly.

Ref: M Halsey.