How Alex Neil has turned Preston into Championship title challengers The Scot has drawn a host of suitors after working wonders in Lancashire

Last spring, as rumours started to swirl that West Bromwich Albion wished to make Alex Neil their manager, his Preston North End side went into a tailspin, losing four straight games to slide out of Championship play-off contention. Last weekend, with manager-less Stoke City eyeing Neil, Preston’s players reacted rather differently, winning at Charlton Athletic to climb top of the Championship.

Neil, who signed a new three-year deal in April, is going nowhere. Yet Preston, who refused Stoke permission to even speak to the 38-year-old Scot, could be. The team that Neil began building in summer 2017 are playing in a way which suggests a third promotion is not such a far-fetched prospect for a man who had led both Hamilton Academical and Norwich City to their respective top divisions before his 35th birthday.

“We knew when Stoke came calling the manager was confident he’d be staying and with the position we find ourselves in, he probably thinks the hard work done over last two years is paying off now and we’re seeing rewards,” Paul Gallagher, Preston’s matchwinner at Charlton, tells i. “It’s 15 games but if we can keep our feet on the ground and keep playing as we are, we can end up having a really special season.”

Neil’s on-field lieutenant, Gallagher observes his manager closely, seeking lessons for his own work with Preston’s U16s, and he expresses an admiration for his abilities as a tactician which you’ll hear echoed elsewhere at Deepdale. “All the players here love working for him. The training is very good, intense. The detail he gives the players on the opposition is fantastic, what their weaknesses and strengths are. When we go on the pitch we know what we’re doing.”

With Norwich, Neil once reviewed a 6-2 defeat at Newcastle United five times before debriefing his players, yet there’s a human touch too, adds Gallagher. “He’ll go around after training talking to individuals – personal things like how they are and how they’re feeling and little tweaks here and there, what they could have done better in the last game. He’s very good at understanding that players need that little bit of talking to and a little kick up the backside as well – he’s got the fine balance. His man-management skills are very good.”

North Enders might note Neil’s nationality also. Since dropping out of the top flight in 1961, Preston have never come closer to returning than when steered by a Scot. In 1964 under Jimmy Milne, they missed promotion by one place. More recently, there were lost play-off finals under David Moyes (2001) and Billy Davies (2005). Neil, one source suggests, can switch off the intensity better than that pair did.

When assessing Preston’s current position – second in the table ahead of Saturday’s fixture with Huddersfield Town – credit is also due to Peter Ridsdale, who pulls the strings behind the scenes as advisor to the club’s Isle of Man-based owner, Trevor Hemmings. The 67-year-old former Leeds United, Barnsley and Cardiff City chairman prefers a low profile these days yet he works closely with Neil, the pair scouting possible signings together, searching the lower leagues in this country for players with potential (and a team ethic), rather than the pricier finished product.

With just one cash signing last summer – the £1.5m Tom Bayliss from Coventry City – and their highest earners understood to receive around £10,000 per week, Preston operate with a prudence which rather undermines the reputation for excess that stuck to Ridsdale after Leeds’s early-Noughties implosion. After Jordan Hugill’s £8m sale to West Ham United, for instance, he was replaced for £750,000 by Exeter City’s Jayden Stockley, a player who led the line impressively at The Valley last Sunday.

Meanwhile, early twentysomethings like Josh Harrop, signed from Manchester United, and Allan Browne, recruited as a teenager from Cork City and now an Irish international, are thriving in midfield, while the homegrown Ben Davies has matured into one of the Championship’s best ball-playing defenders. Then you have the guiding hand of Gallagher. “I always had the football brain,” says the 35-year-old. “I’m not the quickest, I can get up and down, but I always had four or five steps in my head before the ball comes.”

Gallagher played in the Premier League for Blackburn Rovers and it is not lost on him that Prestonians have seen a good number of their Lancashire neighbours sample Premier League football: Blackpool, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley and Wigan Athletic too. Will the turn of Preston, English football’s original Invincibles, ever come? “You’re not the first one to ask that question,” he says. “We have a mentality now where we do believe that we’re good enough. The players have been together now two, two and a half years and know each other’s strengths. It’s down to us to keep doing it on pitch.” That really would put the proud back into Preston.