Town conclude their pre-season friendly programme when National League Southend United visit Portman Road this evening (KO 7pm).
It’s unusual to have the final friendly only four days from the start of the new season and manager Kieran McKenna explained his thinking following Saturday’s 1-1 draw with Championship Millwall at the Den.
"We wanted to have it, it’s very important to get the minutes up for the players,” he said. "We wanted to give certain players a lot of minutes today but we want to make sure going into next Saturday as many players as we can are 90-minutes ready.
"If there are any injuries or anything that happens during the week, we don’t want any of them coming into the game undercooked.
"A good chance for us to play at Portman Road, a good chance for the players that haven’t played there very often to get another game at the stadium, get familiar with the surroundings and the minutes will be primarily for those who haven’t had minutes today.
"But the other guys will be involved as well and we’ll just treat it as part of our training week.
"I don’t think we’ll start anyone who started today but we won’t decide Saturday’s team until after Tuesday night.
"Everyone’s still fighting for spots, still showing themselves, it’s a chance for the guys who didn’t start today to start on Tuesday night and we’ll look at the team for Saturday after that.”
Those that start may well include Vaclav Hladky, Idris El Mizouni, Corrie Ndaba, Cameron Burgess, Kane Vincent-Young, Cameron Humphreys, Rekeem Harper, Sone Aluko, Kyle Edwards, Kayden Jackson and Tyreece John-Jules.
Dominic Ball and Greg Leigh missed Saturday's trip to South London with knocks but McKenna was hopeful they could return for this evening's match.
One man who perhaps may not be involved is new £1 million signing Leif Davis, who said yesterday he was very tired having returned from Leeds United’s pre-season trip to Australia at the weekend.
Reflecting on how his squad is set ahead of the start of the season proper on Saturday, McKenna added: "You never know 100 per cent until the game starts and it’s only one game and so whatever happens Saturday isn’t going to dictate the course of our season.
"But I think we’ve prepared as well as we can, the players have trained every so hard, I’m really happy with the fixture programme. We finish off with Southend on Tuesday night.
"The squad looks strong, thankfully we haven’t picked up and major injuries over the course of pre-season. The boys who were here last year are getting back into the flow and the new boys are settling in but settling well.
"I think we’ve controlled most of what we can control in terms of it being a really good pre-season and we’ll be as ready as we can for Saturday and look forward to the game.”
Southend, who finished 13th in the National League last season, are likely to include one-time Town academy scholar Nathan Ralph in their line-up.
New signing, forward Chris Wreh, the son of former Arsenal and Monaco man Christopher, also looks set to be involved.