Fleetwood Town's draw with St Johnstone showed positive signs to Simon Grayson

Town continued their pre-season build-up against a side seven days away from the start of their campaign and with European football also on the horizon.

Speaking to the club website after the game on Saturday, Grayson admitted: “It was a real good test for us, they are a team who are starting their season next week and are going into a European game.

“We are a week behind them and are coming off the back of a tough week in Ayrshire so, overall, we had a good performance collectively as a team, but we also had some individual ones as well.

“We are in good shape in terms of the physical condition of the players and today, we had a good game against a good team.

“We’ve worked a lot on out-of-possession stuff over the last couple of days and you could see that today.

“The shape was good, and we didn’t concede too many opportunities and those are things to put in place for the rest of the season.”

Saturday’s game concluded Town’s training camp north of the border as they now prepare for this week’s final pre-season outings with Huddersfield Town, Leeds United and Chester.

The players’ workload has been stepped up as pre-season progresses, leaving Grayson especially impressed by the efforts of the younger squad members.

He said: “We went from 45 minutes for players at Radcliffe, to 60 at Rochdale, so we had that progression again today as they got around 75-80 minutes and the young ones, who came on today, have been with us all week and they haven’t looked out of place.

“The senior lads needed some more minutes in their legs, but the young ones came on and affected the game as they know they are still playing for a place at the start of the season if they keep pushing the more experienced players – more credit to them.”

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