Mark Hughes believes QPR would have beaten Wolves had it not been for Djibril Cisse's sending off.

It had looked like the west Londoners would secure the three points after seeing debutant Bobby Zamora break the deadlock in a first half they dominated. The England international's fledgling partnership with Cisse looked promising, but it only lasted 34 minutes after the latter was sent off for retaliating to a Roger Johnson challenge.

Wolves went on to win 2-1 thanks to goals from Matt Jarvis and Kevin Doyle, and Hughes said: "If we had 11 v 11 I feel very confident in saying we would have won the game quite comfortably. But unfortunately we weren't able to keep 11 on the pitch and we conceded two poor goals in terms of what we could have done prior to the goals going in."

The Hoops manager added: "I was really pleased with what we were producing. I thought the interplay between Bobby, Adel [Taarabt] and Djibril was excellent.

"That bodes well for the future and that is a real positive from my point of view.

"Obviously we are disappointed today because we have lost a key game, but I think moving forward we now have real options up front.

"Djibril will be missing for a number of games but I thought Adel coming back really helped us.

"I felt we did really well defensively but then we let ourselves down somewhat, certainly for the first goal and maybe we needed to be a bit stronger in our challenges for the second one.

"At 2-1 down and one less guy on the pitch, it was always going to be a tough task for us. But I thought towards the end we really took the game to them, had some great efforts and on a better day for us we might have converted one.

"It wasn't to be but, as I said, I was encouraged by the performances of a number of players today and we will be better for that."