Tony Mowbray explains how Sunderland are approaching top-six finale - and how he'll tell his team to play

The Black Cats know that a win in front of almost 6,000 travelling fans at Deepdale will give them a chance of making it into the play-offs, providing other results go their way.

Mowbray is determined to ensure there is no extra pressure on his players, and says the permutation gives everyone a welcome clarity as to what they have to do.

“I want to make it as normal as I can for them, I’m very conscious that I don’t want to do anything different," he said.

"There won’t be any extra presentations, I don’t want an extra day’s training. Sometimes, you can do that for a cup final because a cup final is a cup final. But this is just the next game really. Let’s go and play as we have been doing.

"The game preparation will be the same as for Norwich away, Burnley away, Cardiff away. They’ve all been the same, and I think it’s important we do that. "

“I don’t think there’s any purpose to finding out what’s going on elsewhere [during the game]– we just need to win," he added.

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"The only focus for me will be to win the game. I’m sure there’ll be people whispering in your ear, telling you what’s going on, but I won’t be demanding that the analyst feeds anything down because the sole focus has to be on winning the game. Then, if everybody else wins and we miss out, so be it. We can only do what we can do. It won’t be a situation where you’re thinking, ‘A draw would get you through so let’s just sit in the last ten minutes’. We have to go and win. I like the clarity of that.

“If you were sitting sixth now and thinking, ‘Oh, a draw might be enough’ then that can complicate things. It’s easy for us – we have to go and win. So, we’ll be really positive from the off. I don’t think we need to be cagey. It’s not nice sometimes when you’re 1-0 up going into the last ten minutes and you’ve got people whispering in your ear saying, ‘A draw’s enough’. You don’t know if things are going to change in the last few minutes that might impact things.

"Knowing that you’ve got to win means it’s pretty simple right the way through to the end, no matter how long that end takes. It could be 95 minutes, 100 minutes, but we’ll just keep going to the end knowing that come that end, we need to be coming out with three points.

“The goal difference side of things is pretty positive for us," he added.

"Everybody’s aware of all that stuff. Our goal difference is pretty positive, but we know we have to go and win the game. There’s not going to be a scenario where we’re unsure whether we should be attacking or defending. Let’s go and try to win."