Absent midfield
It's easy to see something's wrong here:
We didn't control the midfield against Preston, and our tactics was based on attacking through the flanks. Our attacking play was pretty one-dimensional, though some great diagonal passes by Ayew and Smith resulted in a couple of excellent chances. We scored from one of them, and the other one was waved offside.
So what's wrong? When we attacked we didn't used the shortest road to Preston's penalty area - directly through the middle. We lacked two things: direct forward passing and runs with the ball.
The result of such positioning was the lack of shots. We simply din't have anyone in a position to shoot.
Not only that our midfielders played more like wing-backs, Ayew and Lowe followed the same pattern.
So when we were attacking all our midfielders and forwards were on the wings, and only a couple of times centraly around Preston's penalty area.
This can be explained by the fact that neither Ayew nor Lowe are dedicated strikers, but some sort of attacking discipline is needed. Also, Gibbs-White has to play there where he has to play, and that's in ATM position - in front of opposition penalty area.
We have always had a direct midfield spine with direct passing and runs with the ball:
Britton - Allan - Siggy
Britton - De Guzman - Michu
Cork - Shelvey/Ki - Siggy
Grimes - Fer - Celina
but under Cooper we've somehow lost that.
Even last season when we had Gallagher in ATM position we had the same problem, and that one is on Cooper.