Preston North End skipper says focus must be on avoiding getting dragged down the Championship table

The 4-0 defeat at Cardiff dropped PNE down to 14th place, there being a 10-point gap between themselves and third bottom Rotherham who have played two less games.

It’s also 10 points going the other way to sixth placed Bournemouth, it unrealistic to think that gulf can be bridged.

North End skipper Browne said: “We don’t want to get roped into anything.

“I think being realistic the play-offs are a long way off, other than something magnificent happening which at the moment I don’t see.

“It’s all about being as strong as we possibly can.

“We have a lot of new players and we haven’t clicked straight away and in preparation for next season we need to gel.

“Our ambition all along was the play-offs but we are not up there.

“We can’t feel sorry for ourselves because we could easily get dragged into it at the other end if we got on a bad run. We need results.

“On Wednesday night we have another game and we have to be ready for that.”

North End’s afternoon at the Cardiff City Stadium was a disaster from start to finish.

They conceded a penalty in the first minute to fall behind, then the Bluebirds netted their second goal just 27 seconds after half-time.

Paul Gallagher and Ched Evans missed penalties within 60 seconds of one another as the visitors blew the chance to get back into the game.

Let off the hook by those two penalty misses, Cardiff took advantage of defensive mistakes to score their third and fourth goals.

Browne said: “We conceded in the first minutes of both halves, we shout ourselves in the foot.

“We had the chance to get back into the game with the first penalty which we missed and then we missed again straight after.

“That summed our day up really, you don’t expect to miss two penalties.

“There were two further mistakes for the third and fourth goals.

“You could say the second half was a replica of the first half in how we started.

“We’d covered most of what had happened in the first half at half-time, then we started in the same way.

“We were the cause of our own downfall, we made four mistakes and got punished for all of them by Cardiff.

“If you look at the game, Cardiff did the basics very well but they didn’t have to do anything special to score their goals.

“It was embarrassing really and we have to be a lot better.”

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