John Mousinho berated his Portsmouth players as they fell to a late 2-1 defeat against Preston in the Sky Bet Championship.
Stefan Thordarson showed impressive footwork to net the winner in the 87th minute of a game that only really exploded into life in the latter stages.
Ryan Porteous netted his first goal for North End in the 76th minute before Colby Bishop equalised with his second goal in three matches.
Despite a good performance for the most part, the Portsmouth boss said: “Ultimately, my focus is on what happened after we got the equaliser, and the performance after that was abysmal. I’m absolutely furious.
“You equalise, 1-1 away from home against Preston – a good Championship side – take the point, sit in and we can still catch them on the counter-attack, but we just went completely off script.
“We started doing the wrong things on the press and the goal is the worst goal we’ve conceded this season.
“I have banged on for 38 games and about 100 games since I’ve been in charge about fouling early, stopping sides from having the opportunity to break on us quickly, but we decided to do otherwise.”
He added: “I can always deal with sides scoring goals against us and deal with losses. I can’t deal with sides scoring goals against us and losses where the players are doing their own thing and not doing what I’ve asked them to do.
“I’ve probably been far too nice to the players for a long time and if the message isn’t filtering in then I’ve got to try and do it in a different way.”
Preston were without a league win in six matches heading into this game and Paul Heckingbottom made four half-time substitutions in a bid to turn the tide.
The Lilywhites manager said: “I’ve been really impressed with Portsmouth, how they’ve changed things and turned things around. I think our game against them marked a big turning point for them down there. They compete to win.
“Without the ball, they’ve become a really difficult team to play against. The press is fantastic, the work ethic of the players is really good and their organisation is good. They make it difficult and I thought we were sort of accepting that in the first half.
“We weren’t, but I felt they were having too big of an impact on how we wanted to play so we needed to change it, and we did.
“I’ve said many times, I want our team to be fearless and to play on the front foot so the changes at half-time were to reflect that.”
