Garner actions anger Page

Port Vale caretaker Rob Page accused Preston striker Joe Garner of conning the referee after seeing his side lose 2-0 at Deepdale.

Goals from Paul Gallagher and Alan Browne secured a fairly routine win for the Lilywhites but the game's big talking point was the sending off of Vale defender Stephane Zubar in the second half. Zubar appeared to strike Garner in the face and was duly given a red card but Page took a different view of the incident and insists the Preston forward had been asking for trouble all afternoon. "It's a mixture of emotions at the moment," said Page. "Obviously I'm not a happy bunny right now. You know that if we are going to do anything when we come to teams like this you need 11 players on the pitch, and I've seen it again and I think it's extremely harsh. I think someone was going to get sent off because of the way the lad (Garner) was playing. "I've looked at half a dozen incidents on the analysis since and quite frankly they are embarrassing. ''But having said that I'm disappointed we rose to the bait because again you're going to come up against people like that who are going to want to gain an advantage by reducing your team down to 10 and you've got to rise above It and not get involved. "As much of the sending off is harsh, I'm disappointed a little bit of ill-discipline maybe had affected the game." Victory for Preston lifts them up to fourth in the League One table and means they are now six games unbeaten in all competitions. And while boss Simon Grayson was unmoved about the red card incident, the former Leeds manager called on his side to maintain their winning momentum. "Three points is the main thing,'' he said. ''You want to talk about the momentum that we've got going and the victory that we've had, but it was a tough game. "I said to the players a few weeks ago that over the course of the season you're going to get games where you can play fluent football and be entertaining, then there are games where you have to grind games out and today we did a bit of both. ''There were times where we played some good stuff, other times we had to really dig in there and be hard to beat and try and see the result through. "There were a few incidents going off obviously and I think the referee and the officials had to have eyes in the back of their heads at times, but we were on the end of a result and that's all we want to talk about. We stuck to the game plan really well." Breaking news, transfer gossip, line ups and goal alerts from your football club - delivered direct to your mobile. Sign up for Sky Sports Alerts