The development side claimed a goalless draw with Llanelli Town in their opening friendly fixture of pre-season before going toe-to-toe with the Sky Blues’ first-team at Compton Park on Wednesday afternoon, but the Championship outfit’s quality shone through.
With a younger squad than usual set to now head to America for the MLS NEXT Pro Invitational due to several senior under-21 players making the journey to Spain with Bruno Lage’s first-team, Collins hopes that the difficult schedule will prove to be of great benefit to his squad, and something they can take into their upcoming Premier League 2 season.
On friendly pre-season fixtures
“Getting minutes into the lad’s legs and a training exercise is exactly what these opening friendlies were all about.
“We went down to Llanelli last weekend as part of Josh Esen’s deal from when we signed him, as we agreed to a friendly with them. It was a long trek up there, on a hot day, but it was a great first test of the squad, and we managed to get through the game with no injuries.
“We took two teams up there and gave them 45 minutes each and it was a good run out. We enjoyed going there.”
Welcome to the Wolves Academy, Josh Esen!
— Wolves Academy (@WolvesAcademy) September 17, 2021
The youngster joins our under-18s from @LlanelliTownAFC after a successful summer trial.
✍️🗞
On a heavy defeat to Coventry’s first-team
“It was a really tough afternoon. With a lot of our lads being away in Spain with the first-team, we had a lot of younger players in the squad, who might not have the experience of some of the players we were missing, and against a strong Coventry team – they brought their first-team down – it was a difficult test.
“But that was great for us because it gave us a brilliant insight into the quality needed to play at Championship level, and how easy it is to get punished if you make a mistake. We got punished with almost every one of our mistakes.
“At this stage of pre-season, it was a really good lesson for us moving forward, because we’re moving into a higher division this season, and when we’re building out from the back or give the ball away, we’re going to get punished, so we need to do better with our transitions, we’ve got to do better with our recoveries.
“So even though it was a difficult afternoon, against a team who were far more experienced and far superior to us, we learnt a lot about ourselves.”
On heading out to the US
“We’re all looking forwards to going to the US. A lot of our boys have gone to Spain, but we’ll take the boys who are still here and a couple of the under-18s over to the States for a tournament in Salt Lake City.
“It will give us the chance to get to know some of the 18s players better, and integrate them into our group, but it’s going to be a tough schedule out there.
“It’s going to be very, very hot, I think almost 40 degrees most days, and we’ve got three games against three tough opponents, in two MLS teams and Chelsea. It’s probably games that with the group we’re taking out are going to be a little more difficult than we’d like.
“But pre-season is about getting minutes into legs, getting through those without injuries and building in our tactical ideas to move forwards for the season, so results aren’t the be-all-and-end-all at this point, and we’ll look forward to the challenge because it’s going to be tough.”
On taking positives from facing difficult opponents
“A lot of people say you learn more from defeats than you do from victories, and in development football, that’s really true. We had a magnificent second half to last season, with only one defeat, so you can get a false sense of where you’re at – the players individually and as a group.
“I think having really tough opponents at this point in pre-season has set the bar really high and has been a big challenge for our players.
“We’ll learn a lot about them, we’ll learn a lot about the group and we’ll definitely get plenty of defending work in, which is something we need to do as we didn’t have much in the second half of last season because we were more dominant in games.
“We have to take the positives out of it, and get what we can out of it, and that’s what we will do.”
On preparing for the new season
“These games will give us the chance to judge where we’re likely to be this season. I don’t know what group Chelsea will have there as their whole first-team and under-21s are out there in America at the moment.
“They’ve got a lot of players to pick from, so who knows what group they will be taking over to the Salt Lake City tournament, but it will give us a really good idea, even playing against the MLS youth teams, the standard that we’re going to be up against this season, and I think that can only be a good thing.”
