Ryan Lowe hailed the spirit of his injury-hit Preston squad after they battled to an entertaining 2-1 win against Sunderland.
Lowe is missing six first-team players, including Ched Evans and Emil Riis, but revelled in an excellent win at a raucous Deepdale courtesy of Mads Frokjaer-Jensen’s second-half strike.
Frokjaer-Jensen helped to set-up Preston’s opener, when his shot deflected in off Will Keane, before Jack Clarke equalised for Sunderland with a penalty following Kian Best’s scruffy tackle.
Frokjaer-Jensen then scored the winner on the hour mark and Lowe was proud of his team after securing four points from six in the Championship so far.
“We’d like to have played a little bit more football but sometimes it’s just winning games of football early doors,” he said.
“We’re down to the bare bones and have got a lot of kids out there.
“Until we get a fully fit squad back, we’ve just got to find ways how to win and that’s what we did today – we found a way to win.
“It was a bit nerve-wracking I must say, but it was entertaining football.
“I think we were a little bit different in terms of being a bit more dogged in our defence and doing the right thing and stopping them at source because they’ve got some good players.
“They’ve caused loads of problems but we felt if we could deal with that, we’d always have opportunities to score goals which we did. Overall I’m pleased with the performance.”
Preston sit eighth in the table after two games, but Sunderland remain without a point after a second successive defeat.
The Black Cats reached the play-offs last season but manager Tony Mowbray is refusing to panic about their slow start.
However, he admits they need to sign a striker quickly after watching his team again struggle in the final third.
“Everybody behind the scenes is working hard to try and bring attacking options to the team,” he said.
“Hopefully we’ll find a guy who lives for goals and keeps banging the ball in the net and all the play building up to it, somebody is going to have a good time at the football club, hopefully.
“You should judge football by the performance of the team, but we don’t, we all get judged by the results. The results are not very good but the performance levels of the team in both games has been pretty high.
“I don’t live by expected goals, but somebody said we were top six in expected goals last weekend and yet lost, and I don’t know the number of times we got behind them in the six-yard box and just (didn’t) pick somebody out to side-foot into the empty net today.
“It’s fine margins. Was it too much different from the game at the end of the season where we had plenty of dominance but put the ball in their net three times?
“We’ll be fine and I feel as if the team are functioning OK, apart from the last little bit and we’ll be fine.
“It wasn’t to be today and we have to accept it and I’d be more worried if the team weren’t creating any chances or weren’t functioning.”
