Leyton Orient head coach Ross Embleton will continue to rotate his squad during pre-season as he looks to get the best out of everyone while not pushing his players too close to injuries.
The O’s will welcome West Ham under-23’s to the Breyer Group Stadium this evening on the back of a narrow 1-0 defeat to League One outfit Northampton Town on the weekend.
An early goal from Sam Hoskins was enough for the Cobblers to begin their pre-season campaign with a win while Embleton’s men suffered first defeat since returning.
“When you play a game on the Wednesday night, you’ve got to be careful of what you do on the Saturday, and the important thing is that we don’t overload players too much,” Embleton told the club website.
“With the Tottenham game being on the Wednesday and the West Ham one, we’ve got to be clever in the way we pick the teams, in order to not push the boys to close to injury but at the same time we have to push them to be stronger physically.
“Jobi McAnuff was only excluded today (Saturday) due to playing a good amount of minutes on Wednesday so we didn’t want to push him any further.”
The boss although disappointed with the defeat was keen to pick out the positives from his side’s performance.
“Obviously disappointed when you lose any game, but that’s not critical to us, it is that we gave away a goal that I’m disappointed with and we missed a couple of good chances – one from a set-piece where I feel we should do better to score.
“At the same time, we created a number of opportunities, and it was the first game that is going to be a bit more like what we’re going to be playing against week in and week out.
“I was pleased with the way the boys stood up to the physical battle. There was a lot to take out of it, one of the biggest ones was that 10 out of the 11 players played 90 minutes.”
Orient assistant coach Danny Senda has been working hard at improving their set-pieces revealed Embleton.
“Danny Senda has brought in a lot of creativity to that and it’s something we need to develop and improve on.
“We have been working on it, I thought we created and got a number of corners against Spurs in the week without actually finishing them off, but we looked a threat.
“We changed it around today (Saturday) as it’s important people don’t see too much of what we’re going to use throughout the season.”
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here