Paul Heckingbottom believes there is still much more to come from Alfie Devine

Paul Heckingbottom says there is more to come from Alfie Devine after his brace in Preston’s 3-1 win over Stoke at Deepdale.

The 21-year-old Tottenham loanee cancelled out a fourth-minute volley from Sorba Thomas with a composed finish in the 15th minute and completed his brace with a delightful dink for Preston’s third on the hour mark, just minutes after Milutin Osmajic had headed them in front with his eighth goal of a turbulent season.

The Preston boss said: “Alfie [Devine’s] a good player and a good lad. I don’t think we’ve seen the best of him, as good as he’s played, I don’t. I think there’s more to come. He needs pushing but with that as well, you need to understand, he’s played a lot of minutes in this league and it’s tough.

“You’re a young boy, you have peaks and troughs, but where we need to get him is in that consistency of performance because he’s got the ability, he’s got the brain, and he’s got the talent to affect the games on the pitch.”

It was Preston’s first win in eight and just a third win at Deepdale since the turn of the year and Heckingbottom admitted that his team needed that win.

“It’s about the wins because nobody’s interested in what you say when you’re not winning,” he added.

“It’s about the win. We have played well in previous games and not got over the line and today we started really well again and then their first pass, their first cross, and they score.

“We had that against Norwich where we started the better team and they went one-nil up and Kenny McClean puts one in the top corner from a free kick. We are the dominant team again and we can’t get the win and can’t get the points.

“The performance was excellent from start to finish. We turned this game around from that difficult start and there wouldn’t have been just been me thinking, ‘Here we go again’ [initially].”

Mark Robins pulled no punches in his assessment of the match with the Potters second-best for the most part.

The Stoke boss said: “It was poor to start with. We just didn’t start with the intensity that we needed to play with and played without any quality.

“We’ve given them chances to get the ball in our box. Not the way we wanted to start the game but they put you under pressure with the way that they play so you have to deal with it.

“We ended up getting our first decent move down the right and Sorba [Thomas] scores. There was an opportunity there to win this game really well tonight and that’s the biggest disappointment.

“We’ve let the supporters down and we know we have. We didn’t use the ball well enough, we didn’t make good decisions on the ball, or off the ball. They’ve had three shots on our target and they’ve scored three goals. It’s really poor. I’m not accepting that. It’s just a really bad performance.

“We can talk about individuals but collectively we were miles off it and didn’t look anything like our team. You can play any different way that you want to but you have to play the way that suits you and we didn’t do that.”