Preston and Wrexham close the gap

Central defender Nik Kudiersky

Preston and Wrexham were the two teams closest to Burnley in the league and both won this week, Wrexham beating us and Preston recording a 3-1 win against Shrewsbury at Chorley.

North End were 3-0 up by half time with all the goals coming in an eight minute spell. Former Cardiff player Paul Parry got the first and that was followed by a double from Watford's Nathan Ellington. He was on trial but yesterday completed a loan move to Deepdale until the end of the season.

Half time substitute Ben Evans pulled a goal back for the Shrews early in the second half but it was nothing more than a consolation goal.

North End, like Wrexham against us, played a very strong and experienced side and it was the experienced players who impressed Preston reserve coach David Unsworth. He said after the win: "As normal I have to say the lads who have stepped down to the reserves for a game have been very, very good, very professional. I'm delighted with that.

"I'm a little disappointed with the young pros and some of the younger lads today but you can see that we haven't had a reserve game for a long time."

Two of the other three games fell victim to the weather and the game at Accrington was called off following this week's awful news of Macclesfield's Richard Butcher passing away at the age of 29.

Burnley's next two fixtures have been re-arranged leaving us without a game for six weeks. The game at Shrewsbury in two weeks time has been put back four weeks whilst the Macclesfield home game will now be played in April. The away game versus Bury has also moved back one day.

Those fixtures are all now showing on the fixture list (see link at the bottom of the article).

The results and next fixtures are shown below along with the league's leading scorers and the Burnley goalscorers.

This Week's Results

Wednesday 12^th January
Preston 3 Shrewsbury 1
Wrexham 4 Burnley 2

Postponed Games
Accrington v Macclesfield
Bury v Oldham
Tranmere v Morecambe

Next Fixtures

Wednesday 26^th January
Accrington v Morecambe
Macclesfield v Oldham
Wrexham v Tranmere (at Airbus UK)

Leading Goalscorers

9: Alex MacDonald (Burnley)
7: Mathias Pogba (Wrexham)
5: Jamie Douglas (Preston), Wes Fletcher (Burnley)
4: Tom Bradshaw (Shrewsbury), Benjamin van den Broek (Shrewsbury)

Burnley Goalscorers

9: Alex MacDonald
5: Wes Fletcher
3: Jay Rodriguez
2: Chris Anderson, Michael King, Dominic Knowles, Kevin McDonald
1: Brian Easton, David Edgar, John Guidetti, Steven Hewitt, Curtis Woods