Following the crushing stoppage time winner from West Bromwich Albion at Hillsborough on Tuesday night, Brian Laws was adamant that the sending off of Jermaine Johnson was key in Wednesday's 1-0 defeat.

The Jamaica winger was red carded on 78 minutes after an altercation with Albion captain Jonathan Greening. Wednesday had worked hard all over the pitch, keeping the promotion contenders at bay for much of the game but fell to substitute, Kevin Phillips' late header.

On Johnson's dismissal, Laws said: "It was a turning point because we were down to ten men and to have any chance of winning or getting a result against West Brom you want all of your players on the pitch. I think that incident upset quite a lot of people, particularly the supporters, players and myself because I didn't think there was anything in it to justify a red card.

The Owls boss questioned referee Andy D'Urso's controversial decision but did not want to lay the blame for defeat at the hands of the official.

"Mr D'Urso sent somebody off for Stoke at the weekend and made a blatant mistake. Let's hope he looks at this one again and says the same thing, I don't know. I will have to leave that call to him I think, we can use every excuse under the sun and have a right go at the referee but that's not the right option; I still believe we should have done better, even in those last two minutes of the game when you have to run the clock down.

"Just at the end we allowed West Brom to get their cross in, we ball-watched and the one man you don't want to get the ball does (Phillips).

"It's soul destroying but I said to the players: 'if we want to we can put our head in our hands, blame the referee and sulk for days or we have got to move on.' That's what I'm going to do, look at the next game, that's QPR on Saturday and that one (West Brom) has gone now.

"We deserved more; nobody can question the desire, the commitment and the drive that we had today and the support was fantastic, it gave us that extra edge and we made West Brom look ordinary but we didn't get anything our of the game," Laws concluded.

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