Boss Roy Keane felt the Blues were again made to pay for their failure to take their chances as his side slid to their sixth successive league defeat at Preston. Iain Hume’s second half strike gave the Lilywhites a 1-0 victory at Deepdale.
Keane said: "The first half was fine, no problem, but the game is 90-odd minutes long. We had good possession, we got into threatening positions, particularly in the first half and at the start of the second, but we don’t seem to be capable of scoring many goals, and that puts you under pressure constantly."
The Blues manager felt his side gifted the opposition another poor goal: "Repeating myself once again, we gave a soft goal away. It’s not as if teams are opening us up. After that we huffed and puffed without having that quality in the final third to get us back in the game.
"The second half performance was a bit disjointed. Once they’d got the goal they had something to hold on to, but we always expect more from the players, whether that’s in terms of creating that chance, that bit of quality, when in shooting positions hitting the target.
"But that’s been going on for a few months now, even last year. We don’t score many goals. Whether we play one up front or two up front, we don’t seem to have that little bit of quality in the box. And that’s the hardest part of football.”
Keane says there is no issue with his players’ application: "There’s no problem with the commitment and effort and possession, but you’ve got to score goals, and we don’t score enough of them.
"That’s nine defeats in 11 now and at any level in any league, in any country that is not good enough.”
The Irishman, showing signs of the return of the beard he sported during his latter days at Sunderland, still feels he can turn things around at Town but conceded that whether he will be able to is ultimately not up to him: "That’s out of my hands, don’t ask me questions I’ve got no control over.”
Preston manager Darren Ferguson, whose father Sir Alex was in the crowd, was pleased with the three points despite a poor beginning to the game: "We started really slowly, we couldn’t keep the ball well enough and they penned us in a little bit. It was a slow start and a nervy start.
"But we got a spell at the end of the first half of about 10 minutes where we got a lot of corners on the bounce and in the second half it was far, far better.
"I had to have a bit of a go at them at half-time, but they responded. We played really, really well in the first 20 minutes of the second half and that alone was enough to win us the game.”
As for Keane's current predicament, Ferguson said: "I don’t have to worry about Roy, he’s a very, very strong character. I’m sure he’ll be fine.”