Uwe Rosler says he will ease his side into their pre-season friendlies by playing two different teams in each half of Friday evening’s visit to Harrogate Town (7.30pm kick-off).

The squad returned to Thorp Arch a fortnight ago and have been put through their paces with what Rosler describes as a “lot of high-intensity football games”, and the head coach is now hoping to take that into the game at Wetherby Road.

“I think we’re seeing it as a training session under game conditions,” he said.

“We’ll train before the game and we trained hard yesterday. We’re not preparing especially for that game, we’re taking it out of our training programme.

“It will be played at a good tempo. There will be two teams – everyone will play 45 minutes.

“I don’t want to risk any injuries by playing for too long. The players will play longer in the next game against York.

“Step-by-step, we will increase the amount of minutes for them.

“Hopefully we will get a good game with some goals.”

It will be the first glimpse of Rosler’s side in action for the travelling United fans, with a capacity crowd expected at Wetherby Road.

“I think it’s fantastic,” the head coach said. “It’s so much more fun and it’s great motivation for the players when two, three, four or five thousand away fans are watching the game.”

Reflecting on pre-season training so far, Rosler added: "There have been lot of high-intensity football games – small-sided but also 11 versus 11.

"We’re starting to work tactically as well on formation and pressing  and pattern of play.

"It’s been a colourful week. There has been a lot of volume in training and so far, so good.

"At this stage of pre-season the players should feel very tired, a little bit exhausted as well.

"If they were feeling too fresh now, I think we would have done something wrong.

"The players need a good balance between working them hard but also refreshing them and making sure we’re not losing players to injuries."

LUTV will have full match commentary of Friday evening's friendly at Harrogate, with Thom Kirwin joined in the commentary box by former United defender Ben Parker for pre-match build-up from 7.15pm - click here to subscribe now!