Having lost away at Leeds and Rotherham plus only drawing away at Bristol indicates to me that this is a banana skin of a fixture. Hopefully our mundane and lacklustre starts are a thing of the past and we can step out for kick off with a swagger and a killer instinct.
Echo what Mortis says we were garbage on Saturday so the players may have a point to prove, on the whole we have completed pretty well this season, only Saturday and a second half surrender at Brentford have let us down, I'll be happy with a point expect you to win but you have been a shade iffy on the road recently. Safe journey all.
The only time I have been to Deepdale was back in 1962. My boss when I worked in Lancaster was a mad Preston fan and he took me to see you play Middlesbrough. You won 4-3 in an enjoyable match. A young lad was running around in your youth team at the time and he went on to become quite famous!
Difficult one this ... on one hand I agree it would be good to stick with a winning side but then we have sufficient depth in the squad to be able to give some of the fringe players match practice - improves our chances when we have to make changes during the remaining games. We shouldn't really have a problem with giving Hayden, Diomande, Luer, Snodders and Thudd starts and really go for it.
Looking forward to this one. If Brucey makes more than 2-3 changes I will be unimpressed. I can see Snodders staring in place of Elmo. Diomande to start instead of Abel, with Abel being on the bench 'just in case'. No way should Akpom be started. Maybe Maloney for Mo. I certainly wouldn't be breaking up the Meyler/Livermore partnership from the off, irrespective of Huddlestone's availability
There's been nothing about that. Bruce has mentioned resting players who he knows won't handle it. He usually, rightly, gets criticised for identifying the risk of fatigue and then doing nothing about it. We need to get back to dominating away games. Rotherham and Leeds had it far too easy. We should be showing these teams how good we are in their own back yard. Let's get back on track with that today.
We had no recognised defenders on the bench on Saturday. Maybe Bruce is toying with the idea of pushing Hayden or Huddlestone into defence to give Davies a rest?
I must have dreamed this quote then:- Oldman: “we have sufficient depth in the squad to be able to give some of the fringe players match practice”
Yep that was me. Still hold by the principle, we simply can't play our best team every match as we'll get injuries, suspensions etc and if we throw people in who are not match fit we'll be in a worse position than rotating the squad when it makes sense tactically. After all we managed to lose against Rotherham and Leeds with what were probably Bruce's best available teams.
What a shower! Players can't play through injuries and suspensions nowadays? I was actually meaning playing inferior players instead of better players. I accept some players may be tired after playing a lot of games but I doubt that applies very often.