JON McLaughlin primed himself for tomorrow’s City reunion at Burton and predicted: “It will be a case of who blinks first.”

The trip to the leaders pits two of the best defences in the division against each other – and two of League One’s lowest scoring strike forces.

Only Oldham have netted less than City’s tally of 28 while Burton’s 37 is just one more than bottom club Colchester.

But McLaughlin and the Burton back four have conceded the fewest goals with only 23 against and the Bantams are equal third best letting in 29.

So the keeper expects a very tight tussle in his first meeting with his former club since leaving Valley Parade 19 months ago.

He said: “The way Bradford play is a very similar philosophy to us this season. We’re both pretty well versed at keeping clean sheets.

“There are different ways of winning games. Peterborough have the attitude of ‘however many you score, we’ll score more’ but we don’t do that.

“We’ve never been a team who score four or five a game. We get a lot of our success from being very tight at the back, working incredibly hard and nicking the odd goal.

“Sometimes you can fall into the trap of thinking because you’re top of the table you have to play all the football and impose yourself on the other team.

“The pressure’s then on to try all the fancy stuff and put teams to the sword. But that’s not really the way we’ve been going about our business.

“Tomorrow’s game could well come down to whoever blinks first or makes that one mistake.

“I’m looking forward to seeing some of the familiar faces again. I’m still in touch with several people at the club.

“It was gutting that Boxing Day at Valley Parade was called off, even if we saw it coming with the weather, because that would have been some occasion.

“But now we’ve got the game this weekend and then the return very soon in Bradford.”

James Hanson has already joked that he plans to score past his former team-mate but McLaughlin intends to spoil his fun.

McLaughlin, who has already kept 14 clean sheets to go with 18 in their League Two title-winning campaign, added: “It was good to see him get a goal last week because he’s not scored for a while.

“But we’ll just have to make sure he doesn’t get on the end of any of the crosses. We know what to expect from the Bradford lads.”

Nigel Clough’s Burton have lost two of the last three to see their lead cut to one point. But they are still on course to crown the club’s first year in the third tier by climbing straight to the Championship.

Phil Parkinson reckons they are the season’s “surprise package” but McLaughlin revealed the squad were always confident of maintaining the momentum from winning League Two.

He said: “We won’t be the first team to have done it. Quite a few teams in the past have used that winning mentality and continued to take on that progress from the year before.

“You get into a habit of winning. It’s what you’re used to and it’s a real shock when we don’t win a game like the couple recently.

“A lot of people on the outside won’t have thought we were capable of being up there after just coming up.

“But we knew we could do well. We knew the team last year was far better than the league we were playing in.

“Credit to Gary Rowett who assembled a team that was always going to win that league. Then we grew again with (Jimmy Floyd) Hasselbaink and got stronger and stronger.

“The change of manager wasn’t quite the same as a new man coming in – it was more like the old boss coming back for everyone around the club.

“It’s been good for us players because he’s not tried to rock the boat and change everything from what we’ve been doing.”