CITY are bracing themselves for today’s battle of the Roses against Preston with Phil Parkinson promising: “We’re ready to give it everything.”

A bumper Bank Holiday crowd will descend on Valley Parade for a clash between two sides with everything to play for in the run-in to the end of the season.

Second-placed Preston are bringing more than 2,000 away fans but City are buzzing again after the Good Friday triumph at Doncaster which pushed them back into the thick of the play-off hunt.

Parkinson is confident his team can build on that morale-boosting result and rise to the occasion once again.

He said: “It will be a huge game but you can’t ask for two better ones over the Easter period than a Yorkshire derby on Good Friday and now a battle of the Roses.

“When we’re sat at home in the summer, these are the weekends you want to look back on. We started Easter well and now we’ve got a chance to go again.

“After the season we’ve had, to still be in contention is tremendous for us all.

“We’ve got too much pride in the camp and honesty to let things fizzle out. We want to keep going and giving it everything we’ve got.

“There’s plenty of time in the summer to rest and look back. We want to keep going as long as we can.

“On Friday we showed signs that we’ve got a group who are ready to go again.”

City have allayed injury concerns over Mark Yeates, the late match-winner when the sides met at Deepdale in November – Preston’s only home defeat of their league campaign.

The Irishman’s shoulder popped out again at Doncaster, a problem he has suffered with on and off for the last year, and he was subbed early by Parkinson as a precaution. But the club have assessed him over the weekend and believe he will be fine.

But there is a slight doubt over Gary MacKenzie, who took a whack on his ankle during the process of scoring against Doncaster.

Preston are unbeaten in 12 and have scored in each of the last 23 games. Kyel Reid could miss out on a Valley Parade reunion because of the size of Simon Grayson’s squad.

The former City winger has not played since coming on as a sub in the FA Cup defeat to Manchester United two months ago. He last started a game at the end of January.

Parkinson said: “We know Preston have got incredible resources with the players they’ve got. But we went there and played really well.

“We just want to play to our best again. If that’s good enough to win, then great but we want to come off the pitch and say ‘wow, we’ve had a really great performance today’ and hopefully that will be enough.

“It will be an absolutely tremendous game.”

Parkinson will steer clear of looking at other scores in the ridiculously tight battle for a top-six place. City played after all their rivals on Friday but he deliberately avoided discussing the results before the game.

“We’ve got to take care of ourselves,” he said. “I didn’t even talk about the other results when we came to the ground.

“We spoke about what we felt we didn’t quite do on Tuesday (against Chesterfield) and what we needed to do better. We know what we have to do to fulfil the criteria to play well and we ticked a lot of the boxes.

“Friday was a big game and we could feel it before. The lads knew it.

“You need big players to perform on big games and people like James Hanson and Billy Clarke were magnificent.

“It was not a one-off. But with everything at stake, I’ve got to say that was as good a performance as we’ve produced and now we’ve got another great game to look forward to.”