Michael Carrick lamented Middlesbrough’s concentration lapses in their 2-1 defeat to Preston in the Sky Bet Championship.
Emil Riis took advantage of comical Boro defending in the 78th minute to score his eighth goal of the season and send Preston fans wild.
Stefan Thordarson had opened the scoring in the 28th minute before Delano Burgzorg’s 52nd-minute equaliser.
“It was a team moment,” the Middlesbrough boss said with regards to Preston’s winner. “Their goalkeeper’s got the ball and we’ve just let him go through the middle of the pitch and obviously the ending is not nice to watch.
“It’s not a good watch at all. We’ve shot ourselves in the foot from being in a position where all we could see was another goal coming our way.
“These are the lessons we have to learn and we’ve got to keep doing something about it or we’ll keep being in the position that we’re in.”
He added: “We were good at a lot of things for a lot of the game. We started ever so well and defended really well at times but it’s just the drop out in a couple of moments.
“We were shooting ourselves in the foot from nowhere and the boys are devastated. I’m devastated. It’s a horrible day to be sitting here with nothing.”
Star striker Emmanuel Latte-Lath hobbled off after 11 minutes and Carrick said: “He felt his groin. How badly and to what extent I don’t know as of yet so we’ll have to wait and see but he felt his groin quite early on and that was a blow for us.”
“I thought we dealt with that particularly well and moved on from it. I felt we should’ve won the game, but we’ll have to see how [Latte-Lath] is. Hopefully, it’s not too long.”
Preston boss Paul Heckingbottom was overjoyed with North End’s efforts.
“I’m delighted with the performance and the application against a good side,” he said. “I’ve said before what I think Boro are and certainly, in possession, they’re a very dangerous team.
“If you let them and you don’t fully commit, they can cause teams so many problems. We had to show all sides of our game today.”
Heckingbottom also criticised some boos from Preston fans who took exception to Milutin Osmajic’s withdrawal for Riis, the eventual match-winner, and praised all his substitutions.
He added: “The groans are ridiculous when [Osmajic] is running himself into the ground game after game and we’ve got [Riis] who’s scored that many goals on the bench.
“We want to be an intense, aggressive team and our subs were fantastic today and one of the reasons they were fantastic is that they mean we can keep our intensity levels as a group so that our levels don’t drop and make it easy for the opposition.
“When people’s physicals do drop, we expect our subs to come on and raise the physical intensity of the game.”
Heckingbottom refused to be drawn into Riis’ contract situation with the Dane’s current deal set to expire in the summer.
“Players can do what they want,” he said. They’ve got every right to run their contract down and what you get when that happens is hungry players wanting to improve either to get the best contract here or the best contract elsewhere.”
