Town boss Kieran McKenna says the squad has one or two little issues from the Southampton game which are being assessed but confirmed Sammie Szmodics didn’t suffer a fracture to his arm and that recent loan signings Jens Cajuste and Chuba Akpom have trained with the squad this week.
Quizzed on how the squad came through the 1-1 home draw with the Saints, McKenna said: "We’ve had one or two little issues from the game that we’re still getting assessed. The squad’s probably not where we’d like it to be in terms of numbers for this stage of the season, but we’ll have plenty to be competitive on the pitch on Saturday and hopefully enough on the bench to have a big impact as well.”
Szmodics was struggling with his arm in the latter stages having collided with Southampton keeper Gavin Bazunu but McKenna says concerns that he had broken it proved unfounded.
"He’s recovering well, there was a bit of fear it might have been a break but x-rays have cleared that up,” he said. "So he’s got some really, really heavy bruising there, but he’s recovering well.”
Regarding Cajuste, who had little pre-season before rejoining on loan from Napoli, he added: "He’s closer, certainly. We’re hopeful that he’ll build up minutes again this weekend. He got maybe 20 minutes on Sunday and we’ll hope to build that up again this weekend.
"Whether that’s minutes off the bench or minutes from the start, we’ll have to make the right judgement because there’s a delicate balance to that.
"And it’s really useful to have him here as that’s a department that’s undergone a lot of change. We’d lost four of the five players from that unit last year before Jens came back with Samy [Morsy], Kalvin [Phillips] and Massimo [Luongo] moving on, so to have Jens back with Jack Taylor, who was here as well, is really helpful from a tactical point of view and an understanding point of view. The integration will be a little bit quicker. Really happy to have him.”
On forward Akpom, who suffered some tightness in training last week having signed on loan from Ajax, he said: "He’s trained with the group now for the last couple of days, so that’s the first really he’s trained full throttle with the group, so that’s a positive step forward. All being well, he’ll be with us for Preston.”