Planet Swans ArchivesHe told the Preston official site: “It was a fantastic shot, but it wasn’t something that we weren’t expecting,” he admitted.
“We did the work on the training ground yesterday – we talked about it and showed the lads a video which explained the power that Ferrie Bodde has got in his shooting so there should have been no surprises.
“Everything that was done yesterday should have prepared the players perfectly for what happened tonight. There were two things that should have happened – someone should have closed him down and Andy Lonergan should have saved it.
“For the penalty, I think Jay McEveley will know he’s made a mistake, and I thought it was a penalty, but it was before that when we shouldn’t have got ourselves into difficulty.
“I don’t think the lad [Jordi Gomez] was getting it to be fair, but I’ve got no complaints about the penalty from the referee’s point of view. I’ve got plenty of other complaints about it but I’m not saying that the referee got it wrong.
“We had something like more than 20 attempts at goal but we weren’t clinical and when you couple that with two horrendous mistakes which led to their two goals it’s a recipe for disaster.”
Irvine’s parting message as to how he’s looking for his players to respond was clear, adding:
“We have two options – we can either roll over and die or we can come out fighting, and I will leave you to decide as to which one we’re going to do.
“We will be getting right back to the basics after this, which will be to make sure first and foremost that we are difficult to score against, and we’ve been too easy to score against lately.
“We’ve made some poor mistakes, some poor decisions, and that has obviously led to us conceding more goals in the last three games than we’ve been considering for some considerable length of time. It’s something we’ve got to work on at both ends of the field.”
