Still pleased with Town’s progress

After a slow first half, Town’s greater fitness, honed during a week’s warm weather training in Portugal, told in the second half with four goals in the last 16 minutes.

Still said: “I’ve seen some good performances. The thing that we need to do is pass the ball quickly, touch pass, touch pass, and we got into that a little bit and we got into it Saturday as well.

“But this is pre-season, and sometimes you can be incredibly good and not the start the season well, or be incredibly poor and start the season really well and I’ve been the soldier in both battles.

“As far as I’m concerned I’m seeing what I would expect to see, what I want to see and I’m very pleased with that. Some of these young ones I think are going to find really good futures for themselves.”

Having fallen to a 1-0 defeat at Boreham Wood in their opening friendly on Saturday, Still is pleased his side are beginning to find the net without even concentrating on that aspect just yet.

He said: “I would like to see some more goals if I’m being honest. We had loads of attempts on Saturday, we didn’t have so many in the first half but quite a few in the second half.

“But we haven’t really done any sort of work, what I call combination work, moves around the box, people making their runs, we haven’t done that full stop.

“After this week we will start looking at that sort of work and I’m hoping that those combinations will produce opportunities for us.”

Town’s team on the night contained one trialist in defender Graham Hutchison and was a mixture of youth and experience leaving Still pleased with the way his young stars are pushing their older team-mates.

“We had to change a little bit,” explained Still. “A few people like Scott Griffiths, who came off Saturday, Alex Wall who came off Saturday, Steve McNulty a little bit of a knock, Alex Lawless not quite right.

“I just thought we would try and change where we could and it will be the same Saturday.

“Then probably from Saturday we will start giving people 90s and doing a bit more 11 against 11 in training as well to give us some game stuff as well. The programme or the plan if you like at the moment is OK.

“We’ve not really played (our strongest team). Second half Saturday we were quite strong but we haven’t said this is our team, let’s go and play it.

“We’ve mixed and matched a bit as we will do again on Saturday and after Saturday we will start to look a little bit more closer.

“Our work will change next week, it will be shorter and sharper, not such long days but it’s important that we get really, really fit and by the end of this week, I think we’ll have done the bulk of our really heavy work.”

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