John Smith's PNE Fans' Panel verdict: Our time wasting in injury time came back to haunt us

However after listening to some of the bewildering comments he delivered during an emotional pre-match media conference I thought he appeared to be more like the ringmaster of "The Big Top" confidently sticking his head into the lion’s mouth as part of the in-house entertainment.

Because of this outburst, before the game started I felt that he was especially in need of a positive result and performance in order to prevent further criticism from his ever increasing number of critics.

I personally thought this might possibly be a tall order as we had lost seven out of our eight visits to this stadium since it opened in July 2005, with our only victory coming in the behind-closed-doors game played during the covid pandemic in 20/21.

In fact apart from this win you would have had to go way back to August 1961 for any fan to have seen a North End team win in Swansea.

With last week’s game with Watford being "The Nightmare Before Christmas" I travelled to Swansea hoping that Ryan Lowe could lay this long-standing bogey to rest by doing something similar to Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, who tried to bring some of the bright colours and cheerful atmosphere of Christmas Town back with him to his dark kingdom in the Tim Burton film.

Lowe made six changes in his starting line-up raising my hopes that with this new formation he would like Skellington manage to stumble through the right door in the woods and put some Christmas Town cheer into the hearts of the hardy band of loyal Preston fans, who had made the long journey down to South Wales and sang their hearts out throughout the game.

In the end though I left the ground disappointed when once again we conceded an injury-time goal which gave Swansea, a side who I thought were one of the poorest teams I’d seen this season, only their third home win of this season’s campaign.

In the stadium car park I overheard a young Swansea fan say to his father that he could not believe his team had won and to be honest neither could I.

After conceding the first goal we had fought back with spirit and at one point had looked like the more likely side to go on and win the match.

However our challenge on the front foot seemed to peter out after some ineffective late substitutions.

I thought our time wasting in injury time came back to haunt us with it being a short backwards pass which led to our eventual undoing.

I made the long journey back after this second successive defeat beginning to doubt whether Santa Claus will make an appearance on Santa Claus Lane this year to bring us any presents of points on the board during our hectic festive schedule.