West Ham manager Sam Allardyce hopes that some of his younger players will come out stronger after the 4-1 defeat to the hands of Wigan Athletic on Tuesday night, according to Sky Sports.

Allardyce handed opportunities to teenagers Dylan Tombides, Daniel Potts, Robert Hall and Matt Fanimo for Tuesday’s Capital One Cup match. Despite taking the lead, the defence appeared fragile leading the West Ham boss to call them ‘comical’ after the 4-1 loss.

However, ‘Big Sam’ hopes his youngsters can learn from the bad experience, “With a result like that it can help them find out that they have to make massive leaps and strides to play consistently at this level.”

Despite Tuesday’s defeat, Allardyce is confident about his future prospects, “They do have the ability and that will develop over the future hopefully.”

The aforementioned quartet have been instrumental in the National Group One of the  newly formed Under-21 league but Allardyce believes that there is still a lot of work to be done on these youngsters “We are doing very well at under-21 level, which is always very nice to see, but it can only develop them so far, so a loan is the next step for some of them so we will let some of them go out.”

The Hammers are now without a win in three games in all competitions. They will be hoping to get back to winning ways when they travel to struggling QPR on Monday night. Former Rangers’ defender Matthew Rose was the only scorer the last team these sides met at Loftus road in the league eight years ago.