'Minutes in the legs' - Parker on split friendlies

BBC News

a day ago

Scott Parker split his squad across two fixtures on Saturday, with the Clarets beaten 1-0 by Stoke City in a game that saw Josh Laurent sent off on the hour.Earlier in the day, Parker attended an in-house fixture at the training ground before travelling to Stoke, thus enabling his entire group to amass minutes as the season nears."It's another game for us, which I'm pleased with," he said after Stoke's victory, courtesy of Ben Wilmot's goal."Obviously, we split the group today, due to just getting minutes in. The number of players we've got, we just needed to get some 90 minutes in legs. We've managed to do that, so that's a real positive."Today's game, there were some positives and obviously a bit disappointing towards the end because we're all here, Stoke included, to try and get the best preparation. They're a week out, we're two weeks out and obviously the game didn't turn out like that because of the sending off, which was hugely disappointing. Overall, we looked a little bit tired, and I suspected that, we've had a tough week. But yeah, overall, we've got what we came here for."The squad was split again. Obviously, a bit of a disappointment, we had a planned game, but we brought that in-house. That was a good game, I was there this morning, the boys did very, very well. We got 90 minutes out of a few players there as well. Then this game as well which was always planned."Overall, the planning of this weekend has changed drastically in the last 24 hours due to circumstances, hence why we came here with a real flat squad. But overall, minutes in the legs, that was a plus."