Preston skipper brandishes his side as 'rubbish' and 'embarrassing' during Luton defeat

Preston North End captain Alan Browne labelled his side’s performance against Luton Town yesterday as both ‘rubbish’ and ‘embarrassing’ after they headed back to Lancashire with a comprehensive 3-0 defeat.

The Lilywhites had actually started the game fairly well, former Hatter Jayden Stockley putting a close range header into the ground and over the bar, Tom Barkhuizen testing keeper James Shea at his near post and Browne himself volleying wide from a corner.

However, once James Collins opened the scoring with a wonderful moment of chest control and one touch finish, the visitors, who came into the game with the joint best away record in the division, were quite simply blown away by a magnificent Town performance.

Speaking afterwards, Browne tore into his own team, saying: “We were losing the scraps and we got what we deserved.

“I think every aspect they beat us, every position on the pitch, they outplayed us, outfought us, literally everything.

“We were second best, it's inexcusable, it's not good enough, we just need to forget about this.

“I don't think we've ever played that bad, it was shocking all the way through.

“It just passes you by, to a man you can't do anything, because everyone of us just weren't good enough.

“We've been inconsistent all season, but I don't think there's been too much in the game we’ve lost, but to get beat like that it’s just embarrassing.

“It was shocking the whole way through and every one of us wasn’t good enough today.

“There’s not one player that can say that they had a half decent game, it was rubbish from start to finish.”

Browne carried on with his damning assessment of the game too, not absolving himself of any blame either, as he continued: "There was not even a five-minute period where we even looked good, it was the whole game, just abysmal – the worst I’ve ever seen any team play to be honest, unacceptable is probably generous.

“You can accept it when you’ve tried, you’ve performed and you’ve been outclassed or you’ve been unlucky, which I think for the majority of the season, it’s been like that.

“Today you can’t even make an excuse, it’s an excusable, there’s no-one playing football, no aggressiveness, no-one competing, just nothing.

"You could have got 11 randomers from the street and they probably would have done better to be honest.”

“I can’t be shouting at other people when I’ve been rubbish myself.

"You can’t do much more, there’s only so much shouting you can do, but if you’re going to play that badly, it’s not going to fix anything.

"It just needs to be forgotten about and that’s probably the best thing to do to forget it ever happened, to be honest.

“The only positive is we literally can’t get any worse than that, I think if we tried, we can’t get any worse than that.

“It’s up and down in football so hopefully we can go and put things right.

"It’s a hard one to take tonight just because of how poor we’ve been. You’re always going to lose games in football but to lose in that manner, it’s just unacceptable.”