In his own words: Neil Lennon post-Preston

Liam Trotter opened the scoring in front of the biggest crowd of the season at Macron Stadium.

But second half goals from Jordan Hugill and Eoin Doyle secured a turnaround for the visitors.

And Neil Lennon covered the below points in his post-match press conference.

I felt we played well in the first half. Preston were stronger in the second half, but even at 1-1 we had chances to take the lead. We’ve missed good chances today to win the game and have been caught with a sucker punch late on. 

For the first goal I felt we were a bit passive. We feel Eoin Doyle is clearly offside when he turns the ball home from close range for their second goal. When the ball came back across goal he was offside.

We were frustrated with a few of them. There was one occasion where Mark Davies was breaking through and was fouled. There was contact and he went down, but there was no free kick or card. I didn’t understand some of the decisions, but we can’t keep relying on that.

We had to leave him out today because if he had played we were due to pay Liverpool an amount of money. Again, that is frustrating, but the new owners are only just in the door and they have to get their feet under the table and sort out what is best for the club. We don’t want to leave Jay in limbo, so that’s something we’ll have to resolve sooner rather than later.

We feel we lack a bit of experience. We’re missing two central defenders as well as our first choice goalkeeper. We should manage games a little bit better with some of the experience we have in the team. 

We have to keep fighting. Naturally, we’re always going to be looking at the league table, but as each game goes by it looks even harder. People keep saying to me that we are playing well, which I believe we are in patches, but that doesn’t matter right now.