Wanderers make their first pre-season outing on ‘home’ soil when they make the short trip to Oldham Athletic tomorrow (Tuesday) night.
The Whites opened their warm-up schedule with a 2-1 loss to Slovakian top-flight DAC 1904 at the end of a week-long training camp in Bratislava last Friday night.
After putting in the hard yards in eastern Europe, Steven Schumacher’s men are back in Lancashire for games this week against Oldham and then at home to Everton on Saturday.
And the boss is looking forward to the next stage of preparations after a successful first pre-season venture to Slovakia for the Whites.
“I loved it. It's been a really good week,” said Schumacher. “It was a new venue for us, a new place to come and experience pre-season and it's been excellent.
“The facilities have been top-class where we've trained, the stadium, the pitch, the level of opposition that we came up against, I thought it was a really good week.
“The most important thing is that we spent some good time together and we managed to work on a few things that we wanted to implement and the players have come through injury-free, so that's really positive.
“I’m looking forward to getting back into two good fixtures now, a League Two opponent and then a Premier League opponent, so it's an exciting couple of weeks and I'm looking forward to it. It’s all moving in the right direction.”
The Whites will wear their new away kit of burgundy shirts and black shorts for the first time at Boundary Park when they take on the League Two Latics, who spent last week on a training trip to Scotland which they rounded off with a 2-1 win over Everton’s U21s.
Wanderers are again expected to spread the game time across their squad after fielding two separate XIs against DAC, who are well into their pre-season programme and start a Europa Conference League campaign with a second-round qualifier on Thursday night.
Schumacher blooded his first five new signings of the summer in a game which saw Ruben Rodrigues net for the Whites and insists there will be more transfer activity to come as the squad is fine-tuned following promotion from League One.
“We know we're going to need to strengthen,” the Head Coach told Wanderers TV. “We're still obviously short on a lot of players, a lot of areas that we need to strengthen and improve and we continue to try and work behind the scenes as hard as we can to get this squad capable of competing in the Championship.
“We don't feel that we're quite there yet and there'll be loads of comings and goings over the next few weeks.”
Tuesday night’s game at Oldham kicks-off at 7pm with tickets for visiting supporters available to buy online only until midday on the day of the game. For further information and how to buy, please go HERE