Michael O’Neill hopes victory over Preston can give ‘real belief’ to Blackburn

Michael O’Neill hopes Yuki Ohashi’s “fantastic” winner can give Blackburn “real belief” after they dramatically beat Preston 1-0 to ease their Sky Bet Championship relegation worries.

Rovers looked to be heading to a creditable draw against the play-off chasers, but upped the ante in the second half and got their rewards in the fifth minute of stoppage time through Ohashi’s brilliantly-placed header.

Blackburn secured consecutive wins at home for the first time this season and more importantly, opened a six-point gap to Leicester in 22nd place.

After the game, O’Neill admitted victories like this will restore confidence in the squad.

He said: “We had to dig deep. I thought second half, we shaded the game. I thought first half, probably Preston shaded the first half, started the game better than us and then we got into the game from maybe 20 minutes in.

“Second half, we did a lot of good things, we had other opportunities we possibly could have done a little better with.

“The game looked like it was going to drift to a 0-0, but you dig in, keep doing what you do and obviously Yuki comes up with a fantastic header and it’s a great way to win the game.

“The important thing was if you can win a game in that way, it gives real belief to your team because they’ve probably not had that many, come out of tight games like that on the wrong end of the scoreline so that all helps in building confidence and belief in the group.”

Paul Heckingbottom cut a distinctly frosty figure after watching his team surrender the point that would have moved them into the play-offs ahead of the rest of the weekend’s fixtures.

He said: “Anger is the real emotion, I think. Yes, we should have taken a point there. Nature of that and, yes, it’s anger.

“You can take losing, but I’m disappointed. The game itself, we had a feeling Michael would go five at the back, he changed it second half. We picked a team that would play well against that.

“I felt we had control of the game in spells without looking the threat we wanted. We might have had territory, we might have had set-plays, we might have had moments where we controlled the ball, but not enough chances at the end of that.

“If (Andrew) Hughesy hadn’t had to come off, we would have changed it up again and gave them something different to do at the back because we played in front of them too often. First half as well, but we did carry a threat. Second half, we played in front of them too much.”