Although Alex Neil was proud of how his players performed today calling it one of their best performances of the season, the manager was frustrated that they were left empty handed.
Aleksandar Mitrovic’s winner in the 91st minute ensure the visitors claimed all three points at Deepdale after Sean Maguire equalised for North End, and Neil felt that the better team throughout the 90 minutes lost today.
“That might be our best performance of the season,” stated Alex in his post-match interview with iFollowPNE.
“People talk about Fulham being the best team in the league in passing the ball but I don’t think the best team won today but that’s what teams at the top of the division do.
"They find ways to win - there was a bit of naivety on our part towards the end and Ben Davies is really unfortunate that he slips and that allows them to guide the ball home.
“However, we had numerous opportunities when we could have done better at the higher end of the pitch. There’s real disappointment from the players - to play as well as they did and put that much effort in against a really good team - that should have been enough to win the game but you’ve got to turn good performances into points.”
Despite the defeat, PNE remain in contention of a Play-Off spot and Neil reiterated the belief inside the camp of achieving their end goal - and their optimism was equalled by the supporters who were vocal throughout this afternoon.
At the end of the game, there was an acknowledgement from the home crowd of how well the team played and Neil felt the reaction from the supporters reflected his side’s work rate today.
He continued:
“Two things can happen now - we can either feel sorry for ourselves or use it as fuel going into the next few games because we’re capable of beating any team in this division on our day and if that doesn’t prove it today then in terms of belief for the players then nothing will.
“The fans are going to go home agitated and frustrated and they’ll say we could have done this and we could have done that and everybody feels exactly the same way and it’s painful for everybody.
However, anybody who’s come to watch Preston today, will have seen that the lads gave everything today and there’s not much more you can do. Sometimes I go away from games and think we could have done this, we could have done that but I just come away from this game frustrated and disappointed that we didn’t get a result.
“There was a lack of quality at times in the final third where we needed to find that final pass, that final touch or shift the ball a little bit quicker. The difficulty is trying to get into that situation. Generally when we have done that we’ve created and scored more goals but that didn’t happen today.
“All you can do to your players is to give everything they’ve got, and play as well as they can, listen to how we want to play and go and try and win the game and try to implement that and they did that. I’m frustrated for them but really proud of them as well.”
Watch Alex’s interview on iFollowPNE now.