Boss Roy Hodgson today claimed he wasn’t “sad” about West Brom’s Carling Cup exit and insisted it will boost their Premier League survival chances.

The Baggies suffered extra-time heartbreak when Phil Neville’s 103rd-minute strike dumped them out at Everton last night.

But with West Brom bottom of the Premier League, having lost four of their first five games, Hodgson believes going out of the cup is a blessing.

“Our goal is not to win the League Cup, it is to get another season in the Premier League and, to be quite frank, it can be counter-productive for teams like ourselves,” he said, after the 2-1 defeat.

“I couldn’t ask for more than the players gave and had we won it we would have been happy.

“But losing it in the way we did doesn’t make me particularly sad.

“I was very happy with the performance. It’s easy to draw a line under this and move on.”

Chris Brunt’s penalty put Albion ahead before Marouane Fellaini’s 89th-minute leveller sent the tie into extra-time.

And, ahead of Saturday’s visit of his former club Fulham, Hodgson revealed his frustration at the extra half-an-hour his men played at Goodison Park.

“Our priority is the league and we made that pretty obvious with the team selection,” said the boss, who made nine changes following Saturday’s 3-0 Premier League defeat at new-boys Swansea.

“So, extra-time was something we didn’t want because some of these players that played 120 minutes will have to play on Saturday. Luckily there are quite a few back at home that won’t have played.

“Ideally we wanted to win it, which I thought we came very close to doing.”

Hodgson started with Somen Tchoyi up front and Simon Cox and Peter Odemwingie flanking him as he tested out new systems.

“We used this game as something of an experiment as to how we can best use our players,” he said.

“Even that gave me a lot of positives to take away and think about for the rest of the matches.

“It was a game that was always going to be tough but we came very, very close to holding out.

“We were quite dangerous ourselves and could have got more than the one goal we got.”