Les Parry says his side's preparation for the Christmas games against Oldham and Carlisle has not yet been affected by the adverse weather.

The Manager did, however, admit he was hoping for it to get warmer later in the week.

He told Tranmere Player: "We've been quite fortunate. Because the lads have played a lot of games over the last few weeks we gave them an extra day off and it just so happened that that day was a day we couldn't have trained anyway. Today we're going to go inside on an artificial pitch. Hopefully the weather will improve as Thursday is a big day for us as we do a lot of our shape, and it's important we can get on to the pitch on Raby.

"It will be freezing at Oldham. The forecast is that it will warm up towards the end of the week, but whether it warms up enough to get the game on…because I believe it is covered in snow at the moment.

"It's a couple of big games for us. What makes them big is that there's a possibility we could get something out of both of them. Oldham will be a difficult game because our away results aren't fantastic. We're going to try to address that. We're going there with a point so if we can keep hold of that at least that would be a great result.

"Then we play Carlisle who I think have won five out of their last six so are in form. That will be a difficult home game, but what makes it exciting that there is a chance we could get something from both games.

"Oldham are five points ahead of us and it would be nice for them to be two points ahead of us. What we don't want is for them to be eight points ahead."