Bantams boss Graham Alexander previews Sunderland friendly

Championship side Sunderland are the visitors for the only pre-season home game – and Graham Alexander views the jump in class as an ideal warm-up for the curtain-raiser at League Two promotion favourites MK Dons a week on Saturday.

With only the weekend trip to Altrincham to follow, the clock is ticking towards the August 10 kick-off.

Alexander believes the more possession-based football that Sunderland are looking to play under new French boss Regis Le Bris is good practice for what City can expect at Stadium MK.

He said: “This is the closest thing to what we’ll face in 11 days’ time.

“Obviously the first game of the season will be of a similar ilk and we want to fully take part in that.

“We want to play the football we did at the end of last season.

“It was really good and really effective and we used every part of the team in our build-up. We were very potent.

“We want to go into every game and compete at our level. I think it’s a good opportunity and a game the boys are all looking forward to.”

Fans and players will be keen to see the new playing surface, which has been bedding in since the previous pitch was ripped up within 48 hours of last season’s final game.

Alexander has resisted the temptation to make regular checks but was impressed when he had a good look yesterday.

First chance to test Valley Parade pitch

“I stopped myself going up every three days to check on it,” he added.

“I made a vow a few weeks ago that I’d wait until we came back from Austria.

“It’s really grown well. It looks like a proper football pitch and we’re delighted with the progress that’s been made on it.

“It’s a big thing for us. Obviously, we had issues with last year’s pitch but hopefully those troubles are behind us.

“It will be the first time for a few of the boys playing for us at Valley Parade.

“I think it’s always good to play in front of your home crowd for the first time in pre-season. It just gets the juices going.

“It’s the first game where you feel like the season is almost upon us.

“With the other games, there were still a few weeks to go and they feel like that a little bit.

“This will feel like it’s around the corner now so we need to start cracking on. I can feel that buzz.”

Alexander plans to extend the match minutes in the team with some players set to play the full game.

The two trialists from the Austrian training camp have gone. Another is working with the squad this week but will not be involved tonight.

“I can’t imagine that there will be trialists playing in any of these next two games, to be honest.

Graham Alexander, right, and Chris Lucketti in Austria (Image: Thomas Gadd)

“We’re getting down to the latter stages of pre-season and we need to get big match minutes into a lot of the players now.

“We can’t be going 45 and 45 with everybody, we have to get 75 minutes into people now and potentially a couple of 90s.

“We’ve been really pleased with the spread of match minutes we’ve got between the fit players who’ve done all of pre-season.

“We can’t afford to have too many under-cooked players so the next two games are going to be 75s and 90s for the majority if we can.

“It’s very difficult without having an over-burdened games programme to get 90 minutes into every player in the squad. But we feel we’ve got a good chunk of minutes into a good amount of them.”

Sunderland big club with big ambitions

Alexander watched footage from Sunderland’s 1-0 weekend win at Blackpool last night.

“They are a big club with big ambitions. It will be a test on every level, physically and certainly on the technical and tactical side.

“But we’ve hopefully physically prepared for this one a little bit easier on the players than we did for the previous ones.

“We’ve worked them exceptionally hard but now we need to come off them to have their match legs.

“But there are still two weeks of pre-season left so we had a full training session yesterday.”