Blues started reasonably brightly with Darren Carter blazing a couple of shots over the bar from around the 20 yards out region, although neither team really got a hold of the game. The central midfield battle was an intriguing one, with Preston's giant battlers Sean Gregan and Dickson Etuhu facing the slighter and more creative Bryan Hughes alongside Carter. In the first half, Hughes was lost, and consequently it was left to Carter to battle Gregan and the impressive Etuhu, and he rather unsurprisingly lost out.
Preston's goal, after 35 minutes, came courtesy of a swift counter-attack - following some desperately sloppy play by the desperately sloppy Curtis Woodhouse - which left Blues exposed. Richard Cresswell got into the inside left channel and fired a fairly harmless shot across goal, which was certainly running wide until Darren Purse surged into the six yard box and calmly side-footed past Ian Bennett, who is surely beginning to get a little confused as to why his defenders keep scoring against him, and doing so in such a composed manner. Purse's strike certainly rivalled Michael Johnson's volley against Watford seven days ago in the finishing stakes.
The second half followed much the same pattern as the first, with both teams sharing the possession, but creating little or nothing. Blues continued to try and take out members of the crowd with wayward long range shot after wayward long range shot, and on the one occasion when Paul Devlin produced an excellent cross, Tommy Mooney's equally excellent downward header was pushed wide superbly by David Lucas in the Preston goal.
Despite the introductions of Stan Lazaridis, for the woeful Woodhouse, and later, Geoff Horsfield for the unbelievably ineffective Stern John, Blues were unable to carve out any more clear openings. In truth though, the performance was so poor that an equaliser would have been a shock. Hughes did involve himself a lot more in the second half, as he and Carter got a grip of the midfield battle, yet these two were the only two players to come out of the game with any real credit.
This is certainly not a disaster for Blues, especially with Burnley drawing with Norwich, Millwall dropping 2 points and Crystal Palace getting hammered away at Grimsby. However, it did highlight that there is still a lot of hard work to be done.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing out of this afternoon's game was that despite their superior approach work and all round performance, Preston never made Bennett make a save, and but for a moment of madness from Purse, we'd have got a point out of a game where we deserved nothing.
Bluenose Ron
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