Sunday 27th July, 2014 at 6:40pm
After the game Alan Archibald reflected on a hard fought win in the friendly match against Glentoran and gave ptfc.co.uk an update on how pre-season training was progressing:
“It was a good work out against a very physical team. When you come to Ireland you know what you’re going to get in that respect. In a lot of ways it’s very similar to the Scottish game so it’s good preparation for the boys and it was good for us to get the result in the end.
“When you come to Ireland you always get a very good workout and, while I thought some of the challenges were a bit over the top, I thought our lads conducted themselves well and thankfully nobody got injured.”
“Fitness in the team is good and the match sharpness is starting to return. I’m not a big fan of pre-season games to be honest. I always think there’s a chance you can worry too much about getting everyone enough game time and often the matches get a bit disjointed and it stops the team getting into a pattern.”
Having focussed on fitness up until this point the gaffer will be changing things a bit over the next couple of weeks to focus more on the team’s technical levels.
“The training schedule will change a bit now and we’ll start concentrating on different things. That’s us at the end of a four week period of concentrating on fitness and we’ll now go into two weeks of more technical stuff, all very football based.”
“We’ll be ready for the start of the season and that’s the main thing.”
