Sunderland head coach Régis Le Bris has offered his team selection thoughts ahead of Preston North End

Régis Le Bris has unsurprisingly revealed that Alan Browne will definitely play against Preston North End on Wednesday night at Deepdale.

The Republic of Ireland started Sunderland’s last game against QPR with 17-year-old Chris Rigg missing the game with a chest problem. Browne played 90 minutes of the goalless draw as midfield colleague Jobe Bellingham was sent off.

And with Jobe now likely to be banned for three games, Sunderland’s head coach has conceded that the former Preston North End man will start against his former club in the Championship with Le Bris’ options limited slightly by the aforementioned red card.

“He will play and he deserves to play obviously because he's a great professional and with good experience, good leadership, quiet leadership but strong leadership is very interesting,” Le Bris said ahead of the game against Preston North End.

“Obviously our midfielders played very well since the beginning of the season and for Brownie he needed to wait but he knows that that league is so long that he was sure that he'll have opportunities to play so it's now and he did well so I'm confident for him.”

“The league is very competitive and every team is proactive so even if you are in the bottom of the table the team doesn't for a mistake,” Le Bris said when asked about what threat Preston North End would likely pose to Sunderland on Wednesday.

“They try to push, they try to use the man-for-man marking and to play direct play or not and it's not a passive opponent and I'm sure that Preston won't be passive against us. They can manage the man-for-man marking for example, they are strong, they are very intense so it will be a good challenge for us again after Luton, after QPR.

“We'll see if we learned from this experience, it wasn't bad games for us but we need to improve to reach different new levels, especially for the goal kick restart for example or the build-up under pressure and it will be interesting to see if we are improving.”

Le Bris also dropped a major hint regarding his formation against Preston North End with midfielder Jobe set to miss the game.

“I don't think so,” Le Bris said when asked if he could switch to five at the back. “I explained that idea before, we built a system, strong foundations and I don't want to change too early the structure because I think we have now good references and we can change during some phases the shape but it's just because we need to solve a problem.

“For example, we use the back five with a midfielder and not with a centre-back because it's needed during the game but I think we'll work on the back four. I don't know the scenario of the season but atthe minute it's better to play like that because we share the references and we have so much to doto improve, to go further so at the minute I don't think I'm going to change.”