Paul Gallagher called for perspective from Preston North End supporters following the Lilywhites’ 3-0 defeat at Brentford to sign off from the 2018/19 campaign.
The stand-in skipper admitted to his disappointment with how the season was brought to a close, as the Bees edged ahead in first half stoppage time through Erzi Konsa, before efforts from Neal Maupay and Marcus Forss after the break saw the hosts go out of sight.
Defeat leaves PNE with a 14th-placed finish in this season’s Championship but looking back on the term as a whole, the experienced midfielder felt that achievement had to be put into the context of what has been a challenging campaign.
“You obviously want to go into the summer with a victory with people walking away feeling optimistic about next season,” North End’s No.12 told iFollow PNE post-match.
“They can still do that, because you look at it as a whole, we were in a much worse position in October and put two incredible runs together.
“I think we might have just ran out of steam in the end; it’s been a long hard season for everyone and we’ll go away, recharge our batteries and get ready for the new one.
“I think it felt flat, we did want to finish on a positive note but you look at it as a whole and there’s a lot of players missing. You don’t want to make excuses, but these players make a big deal in our team and when you’re without them it shows sometimes.”
On the loss itself in the capital, Gallagher was disappointed with how Thomas Frank’s side breached the PNE backline to score their three goals.
“It’s a difficult place to come, they play a good brand of football,” he continued.
“It was a stop-start first half obviously with one of their lads taking a bang to the head and someone in the crowd as well. It was stop-start, we knew coming here it would be difficult but we wanted to try and finish the season in a positive manner but overall it wasn’t good enough today and we got found out and we didn’t want to end the season with a 3-0 defeat.
“I thought we started reasonably well, but we talked about them really getting into areas for cutbacks and we’re disappointed with conceding two goals from that. The third one was the transition and they break away and they score.”
Watch Gally’s full post-match interview now on iFollow PNE.