Thursday morning at Preston North End’s Euxton training ground and there is “an absolute buzz around the place”, according to the manager, Ryan Lowe. For good reason. A new signing is in the building, the Montenegro striker Milutin Osmajic, who Lowe describes as like hugging a brick wall, while players and staff are catching up after the international break. The Championship table, however, explains the main reason for Preston’s positivity.
Top of the pile after a five-game unbeaten start, Lowe’s team are relishing their role as surprise early pace-setters of a notoriously competitive division. Preston could make it five league wins in succession on Saturday against Plymouth, their manager’s previous club. No one is getting carried away, there is almost 90% of the season left to play after all, but having risen to the summit despite losing several key players in the summer, and being struck by injuries to several more, Lowe is adamant a proud and historic club should enjoy the view.
| Pos | Team | P | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Preston North End | 5 | 5 | 13 |
| 2 | Ipswich | 5 | 4 | 12 |
| 3 | Leicester | 5 | 3 | 12 |
| 4 | Birmingham | 5 | 4 | 11 |
| 5 | Norwich | 5 | 6 | 10 |
“I said to the lads after the last game [an impressive 2-0 win at Stoke]: ‘Enjoy the moment of where you are because you deserve it,’” says the Preston manager. “I’d like to say yes [his target for the season has changed] but we are only five games in. Last season we gave the lads a load of targets, objectives and strategies to get to where we wanted to be. We haven’t done that this year. We are taking each game as it comes but we are doing unit meetings after every five games – for defenders, midfielders and attackers – and after the first five games we are in the top six for duels, attacks, xG, creating chances, crosses, everything. But we are not getting too carried away.
“We’ve had a good start and we just want to keep winning. We are going to lose games of football, we know that, but if we can keep accumulating points along the road we can have a look at it with maybe 10 games to go. We are just going to ride the crest of the wave we are on at the moment. We deserve to, because we’ve been playing well.”
Lowe tweaked his tactics during a difficult pre-season that underlined the need for reinforcements following the departures of the influential Daniel Johnson, Álvaro Fernández and the on-loan Tom Cannon. The club shifted their transfer strategy too, turning to the European market to sign Mads Frøkjær-Jensen from Odense, Osmajic from Cádiz and the on-loan Canada international Liam Millar from Basel. Will Keane has made an immediate impact on his return from Wigan, scoring four goals in five league appearances. In a league where half a dozen rivals benefit from parachute payments from the Premier League, it is imperative Preston get their recruitment right.
The manager admits: “We have a budget and a structure that we have to stick to and that’s fine, I’ve never complained about that. Are there bigger clubs out there who can pay more money? Of course there is. Does that necessarily mean they are going to be better than you? No, it doesn’t. It’s about whoever wants it most. I would go to war with all my players because I know they will put it all out there. We may lack quality at times but we definitely won’t lack effort, determination and desire.
“It depends how you look at it. Someone might have a fear of going to Leeds because all their players are on X, Y, Z and the stadium is bouncing, but some people might have a fear of coming to Preston North End and Deepdale as well. We relish the opportunity of playing against those big teams with big budgets. I’m not going to lie, when you beat those teams it feels good. They might be a big club, or a so-called big club, but they are in our league and they are competing with us now. I’m not being disrespectful to them but they are there for a reason. The parachute payments and the budgets they have are tough to deal with but we can’t do anything about it.”
Saturday brings Lowe into confrontation not only with his former club for the first time since resigning to take the Preston job in December 2021 but also against one of his closest friends, the Plymouth manager, Steven Schumacher. It was Lowe who took his fellow Liverpudlian to Plymouth as assistant manager and tried to lure him to Deepdale in the same role before Schumacher succeeded him at Home Park, guiding Argyle to promotion last season. The pair speak several times a week.
“He was always going to be a manager because he was very skilled at what he did. He has done fantastically well,” says Lowe. “We are best of mates and a 90 minute game is not going to get in the way of our 15-year friendship. He wants to beat me and I want to beat him, simple as that. I have big affection for Plymouth. It was disappointing how I left, if you could turn it back it would be different, but going from one fantastic football club to another fantastic football club that you can’t turn down was the reason I left.”
