Lincoln City were reduced to nine men inside the first half as West Ham delivered a 6-0 thrashing in the Championship

West Ham played more than an hour against nine men on Wednesday night but Lincoln City's head coach has no complaints about the dismissals. Tom Hamer was shown a straight red card inside the first five minutes for a horror foul on Joel Veltman and Conor McGrandles followed suit for a last man foul on Jarrod Bowen.

The visitors were still kept at bay for much of the first half but the floodgates opened after Dinos Mavropanos broke the deadlock on the stroke of half-time. Edvin Austbø scored less than three minutes after entering as a second-half substitute and Bowen made it three moments later.

Three became six inside the final 20 minutes, with Pablo scoring his first league goal for the Hammers and Tomas Soucek scoring a late brace from the bench. The two red cards cost Lincoln dearly but Shaw refused to blame the referee.

"They are incredible fellas and top pros – they didn't let us down and they will learn from this as will we as a group and we'll move forward. These things happen," Shaw said.

"They were both red cards and two decisions the referee definitely got right. There were some I didn't particularly agree with in the first half, but the big decisions looked like they were correct."

He added: "After three minutes I thought we responded pretty well with 10 men. I thought we had 20 minutes where we competed with West Ham.

"That's the overriding frustration of the evening where we didn't get a proper game. That 20 minutes makes me think we really could have troubled them. It was a tough night for everybody. We need to take a little bit of learning from it because we can do better, especially the goals, even with nine men.

"We have got to bounce back and pretty quickly as this was a pretty brutal experience against the best quality in the league."

West Ham remain third in the table despite their victory, with Swansea and Middlesbrough occupying the two automatic promotion spots after midweek wins of their own. It is the second time this season that the Hammers have hit six in a league win but manager Nuno Espirito Santo credited the opposition for making his team work for their victory.

"I credit Lincoln as even with one man down they were in the game and still creating a lot of problems for us," the Portuguese said. "It became difficult to find the gaps.

"I think we made mistakes in terms of trying to rush things, trying shots from long range because you want to score so desperately.

"It changed after the second goal and we played much better, in terms of being patient, recycling of the ball and being clinical, which is what you want."