Curle confident Cobblers will be fit and ready in time for the play-offs

Cobblers boss Keith Curle is confident he can get his players fit and ready in time for the Sky Bet League Two play-offs - should they go ahead.

Players and staff were at the PTS Academy Stadium for coronavirus testing on Thursday and will take their first tentative steps back to training next week.

The play-offs have not yet been ratified - confirmation of that should come on June 8 - but they are expected to go ahead and despite only having a maximum of three weeks training before the first leg of the semi-final, Curle feels his players will be in good shape.

"The players are desperate to be back out there again," he said. "I think there's been a renewed focus because the players have now got dates and times to adhere to with testing on Thursday and Monday being the day we're back in training.

"We'll only have a few weeks before the games so it's about the importance of the programmes we advised the players to follow and their basic level of fitness is expected to be very good.

"The focus of all the work they've been doing through the past few months has got an end result and now it's just a case of getting back out on the pitch and familiarising themselves with the football and the patterns of how we want to play.

"We've got an identity of how we play and it's just about reinforcing those and honing the assets that we've got, finding the areas we think we can cause teams problems and re-identifying what we're about and how we can get positive results.

"We've got a format and we've got an identity and it's important that shines through, particularly when we've got big games coming up because the players need to turn up.

"We know what we're about and we're not going to try and reinvent the wheel because the fundamentals are in place and we have two and a half, three weeks of reinforcing those key elements."