Ryan Lowe said he doesn’t expect any incomings or outgoings on transfer deadline day, with all the focus on Saturday’s Championship meeting with Ipswich Town.
The final day of the window tends to be a frantic one in football as players become available and clubs make late swoops, however the North End manager is content with the squad which was assembled during the summer.
He said: “It’ll be an early dart today. Our focus is on building and prepping the team for Saturday, doing the right things to hopefully get a positive result.
“I don’t think there’s going to be any outs, and there’s certainly not going to be any ins.
“It’s going to be a quiet one, but I think we were good in the summer doing all our business. It’s been well documented that we wanted to do that and we never want to get to the last day of the transfer window, rushing around to try and sign players.
“We have loads of players on the radar in different categories, different positions, but we won’t be doing anything this January.”
A number of contracts have been sorted during the opening month of the year, though, with Ali McCann, Ben Whiteman and Dai Cornell all committing their futures to the club.
Josh Seary and Noah Mawene are also both expected to soon put pen to paper on new deals, and the gaffer hopes to give them some Championship minutes before the season’s up.
Next up in the league for North End is the visit of second-placed Ipswich Town this weekend, who are looking to fend off pressure from Southampton and Leeds United just below them.
Ryan said: “They’ve done fantastically well. I said in my programme notes Kieran [McKenna] has done a fantastic job with a good group of players.
“They’ve recruited good players. He’s still got large amounts of the players who were with them in League One where they had a fantastic season, scored a lot of goals and played some exciting football.
“I think they’re run excellently well from top to bottom and they’re on the ascendancy to try and get to where everyone else wants to get to. They’ve done fantastically well, but we have to worry about us. We have to be prepared.
“We have to go into the game knowing when we play these good, expansive footballing teams that we can hurt them in our ways, which we’ve done before against other teams.”
Examples of performing against the sides pushing towards the top of the table come as recently as Boxing Day when North End got the better of Leeds United.
The manager also referenced the draw against Southampton at Deepdale in October, when PNE put in one of the team’s best performances of the campaign.
Ryan said: “The belief’s massive for our group of players. If they believe that they can go and do it, nine times out of ten they can achieve it.
“The games you’ve said and the teams we’ve played, and even Sunderland [at home] to an extent. We’ve played some good teams at Deepdale and performed really, really well.
“We’ve played some good teams away and performed. We’ve had a few bumps in the road which we know, but I’ve got every belief and faith in the group of players that they can perform.
“When we turn up and we’re really on it, we’re a good outfit and we can beat anyone on our day, and that’s what we’ve got to do.”