Tigers striker scored twice at Loftus Road on Saturday

Queens Park Rangers were undone by two goals from Jarrod Bowen in a 3-2 defeat at home to Hull City in the Sky Bet Championship on Saturday, and his manager revealed a pre-match pep talk did the trick.

Bowen opened the scoring for the Tigers in the sixth minute, before Markus Henriksen doubled the visitors’ lead 16 minutes later.

Though Pawel Wszolek pulled one back for the Rs in the 24th minute, Bowen added his second with 21 minutes remaining to make it 3-1 to Hull.

Luke Freeman netted for QPR in stoppage time, but it proved too little, too late as the home team slipped to just a second defeat in their last 10 league matches.

And Tigers boss Nigel Adkins revealed what he said to Bowen before the game that inspired him to his double at Loftus Road.

“Jarrod hadn’t scored for a few weeks and I said to him before the game to just go and enjoy playing football,” Adkins revealed.

“Sometimes things can start to build up a little bit and you just need to go and enjoy playing football.

“You can see he had that and he worked for the team, scored two and could have had a couple more.”

The victory lifted City out of the bottom three and was their second win in their past three away games.

“I’m really pleased for all the staff and players. We came from home and again played really good football,” Adkins said.

“We’ve got a team that are so committed to the cause. The team ethos is there and they’ve run their socks off.

“They’ve competed and without any individual the whole team have just worked their socks off again.

“We’ve been playing good football but been caught out by individual mistakes that have cost us games.

“We’ve scored three, could have scored a couple more, and the spirit and commitment of the players is there for all to see and has been for a while now.”