Pre-season done and Gary is ready for the real thing with his new squad

GARY Bowyer is glad preseason is over and the real business of the new League One campaign can begin today.

- By COLSTON CRAWFORD

Nigel Clough’s Mansfield Town are the visitors to the Pirelli Stadium and it will be a step into the unknown for both sides.

The Stags dropped alarmingly down the table in the second half of last season before steering clear of the drop zone, while the Brewers escaped from relegation after their cause looked hopeless at Christmas.

The teams finished seven points apart - Mansfield actually lost one more game than Albion and Clough has looked to build a younger side without the services of Aden Flint and Stephen Quinn among others in the summer.

Bowyer, meanwhile, has lost the experience of Max Crocombe and Ryan Sweeney as well as leading scorer Rumarn Burrell but will hope to have built a competitive, relatively young squad.

Last season's first game, against Lincoln City, was frantic, almost devil-may-care. Do you think that in the early games of the season, teams may have a different mindset because, at that point, they're not X number of points behind or X number of points ahead?

GB: I'll answer that in a couple of games time if you don't mind! I don't know, is the honest answer.

All I know is that it's a great game for us, welcoming back Ryan Sweeney, welcoming back Nigel Clough.

I'm guessing it's close to a sellout. It's very important for us that we concentrate on what we can control and how we go about it.

From our point of view, the preparation is exactly the same and it's about playing our game, not playing the occasion, and continuing what we've been doing in preseason.

We've had some really interesting fixtures and outcomes in preseason and seen a lot of growth with the team already, so it's now a case of continuing that.

It's not just looking at Mansfield, it's looking at how can we improve and we'll go from there.

Looking at the preseason games as a whole, you must have been pretty satisfied with how they panned out?