Davie Irons on the Preston defeat
Assistant manager Davie Irons gave us his reaction to the heavy away defeat at Deepdale on Saturday.
“This game was a huge disappointment for everyone,” he said. “It’s one where you just don’t really see it coming. We’ve defended well and kept clean sheets in recent weeks and we came into this one in good spirits.
“The worrying aspect from a coaching point of view is that we crumbled and that will never be acceptable. We offer our sincere apologies to everyone connected to the club because we were well and truly beaten. I hope people understand when I say that this is one we have to draw a line under and put behind us as quickly as we can. We believe we have the players to get us out of this and our focus will be on getting back to doing things properly for the game on Friday.”
“It’s now important for us to regroup and stick together,” he added. “We win as a team and we lose as a team. We were nowhere near good enough on the day and, like I say, it’s one we didn’t see coming.
“It was a slow start but we were back in the game at half time. We felt really positive but they got their third goal and we didn’t make things difficult enough for them at all after that. We now have a massive weekend ahead of us with two games in four days and, if we do things right, things will look much better for us come this time next week. It’s up to us to turn this round.”
“It’s never easy to explain a performance like this and particularly when we’ve had that run of four clean sheets,” he commented. “Those results give us the confidence to know that when we are focused on the job we will get performances. We have to get back into training this week and we have to get this out of our system.
“The aim when we took over was to keep this club in League One and that hasn’t changed. We are still on track to do that but it is up to us to get out there and prove that. We have come in to do a job and the club has put a lot of trust in us. We know what the players can do and we know they are better than this. It has been an up and down season but, as we’ve seen, when we play well we are as good as anyone.
“The players know what’s at stake and they are hurting after this result. They know they’ve let themselves and everyone else down. We now have to go again and make sure we are much, much better for the game against Walsall. All I can reiterate is that we want to apologise to everyone connected with the club because our performance today wasn’t good enough. That makes us doubly determined to get it right.”
