Saints boss Mark Wotte revealed that he was pleased with his side's first pre-season run out, despite Eastleigh's last minute equaliser…

The Dutchman picked two different elevens to compete each half at the Silverlake Stadium and said that he was pleased to see the squad back in action so early in the summer.

"We've been on the training pitch for two weeks already so that has kept us going but now we've had our traditional training game against Eastleigh and it's good to be back out there," he said.

"Eastleigh gave us a good competitive game and they created some chances. I think in the second half we should have scored a couple of goals, but they could have scored as well.

"The attitudes and efforts from our players so far have been excellent, although you would always like to play better and win the game, but for a pre-season opener it was o.k.

"The result is not that important as we were playing to try and keep everyone fit and in that respect it was a good exercise where everyone played half a match.

"It's never nice to lose the lead in the last minute but we have to prepare ourselves for the 8th August and this was a good build-up for that, so overall it was a decent performance, if not the ideal result."

Back in Action - Simon Gillett on the ball

With many teams still on their summer holidays, Saints are wasting no time in preparing for the challenges of the new campaign although, as Wotte explains, it is more of a marathon than a sprint.

"We have been building the players up gradually so far and they have had days off in-between," he said.

"We could have done a three week pre-season, but then we would have had to train three times a day, seven days a week, and that way you can pick up a lot of injuries."

Saints opened the scoring on the hour when Matt Paterson tucked home a neat through ball only to be pegged back at the death by Tony Taggart's speculative effort.

"The first two or three games are always fitness games to get back in shape and the first big test for us will be against Ajax at home on July 18th," he added.

"That's a big fixture for us and after that we will evaluate and see what kind of quality we need in the squad.

"We have to step up one or two levels before we play Ajax and then we have another three weeks to prepare ourselves for the start of the league season against Millwall."

Pre-season 2009-10 - Click the image to find out more...