Preston boss Ryan Lowe hailed Brad Potts’ ‘fantastic’ winner as his side picked up their first Sky Bet Championship victory of the season with a 1-0 success at Luton.
The wing-back settled the encounter after just 18 minutes, scoring a wonderful flying volley at the back post from Robbie Brady’s cross, following up his first strike of the season during Tuesday night’s Carabao Cup triumph at Huddersfield.
Lowe said: “I just remember seeing him in the air with his two feet and thinking ‘what’s he doing’ and it hits the back of the net.
“Potts has got fantastic goalscoring attributes, I think he’s had that all his career, but in a different role.
“I’m pleased with one wing-back crossing to the opposite wing-back and finding a goal, that’s how we work, we want them in the box.
“If he continues to keep scoring goals like that, I expect the wing-backs to get between five and 10 goals anyway, and he’s off the mark with two.
“I thought the performance was okay, we could have done better in certain situations, but we defended very well and we managed the game very well.
“You can’t come to Luton and go toe-to-toe with them, we knew that, the gameplan was a little bit different to what it normally is because we have to respect a good Luton team that have just missed out on getting into the Premier League last season.”
Potts’ goal lit up a poor first half in Bedfordshire, Luton going close when Luke Freeman dragged wide and Carlton Morris putting a header straight at Freddie Woodman.
After the break, Cauley Woodrow chipped inches over from James Bree’s pass, while Allan Campbell sliced off target and Elijah Adebayo blazed wide, with the visitors’ Troy Parrott shooting straight at Ethan Horvath twice.
Luton manager Nathan Jones added: “It’s frustrating for a number of reasons.
“One, we concede a poor goal, they can say it’s a good goal, two we’ve had enough opportunities to get something from the game.
“We’ve had enough chances, good chances, opportunities, balls in and around their box, set-plays, enough of the game to have got something from it and then just the flow of the game was really frustrating for us.
“I said to the players before, get the first goal as it’s very difficult to chase a game in this weather and in this current climate, and I don’t mean just the weather, I mean the way football is played in terms of how much time it takes to do anything.
“As soon as you go ahead, it’s very difficult to really generate the tempo and that was frustrating today on all levels.
“We’ve put three strikers on at the end of the game, keep hitting the first man so we really need to be better, be a bit more fluent, have a little bit more about us as, if we do, we’re a good side.
“At the minute it’s not quite clicking for us and we’re having a bit of a tough time, but we were by far the better side against Birmingham here, I felt we did enough to get something from the game today.
“So it’s just the small margins we’re coming out on the wrong side of at the minute.”
