Marcus Bignot said that Swindon Town decided to leave players out of their pre-season friendly with Swindon Supermarine as they are not yet fully fit.

Swindon began pre-season with their traditional curtain raiser against Supermarine on Saturday and walked away from a positive performance with a comfortable 4-1 victory courtesy of a brace from Paul Glatzel, with Jake Cain and Jaxon Brown also getting on the scoresheet.

Bignot also stressed after the match that he was especially pleased to leave The Webbswood Stadium having not picked up any injuries during the game, something which Mark Kennedy said was one of the main things he was hoping for last Thursday.

However, there were multiple absentees from the squad for the game with Jack Bycroft, Redman Evans, Ryan Delaney, Tariq Uwakwe, and Ricky Aguiar all not featuring in either half.

Town fielded two trialist goalkeepers during the game, explaining the absence of Bycroft and Evans, but Bignot said that the rest had been left out on sports science grounds.

He said: “It is early [in pre-season] and when Mark and myself came in we did look at the schedule, but Swindon Supermarine are super guys and they look after us, so we didn’t want to cancel the fixture as the relationship is very important to us.

“With the game being so close, for them [the players who missed out] it will just take a few days or a week before we see them.

"The group that we saw today we felt were ready from a sports science point of view and for those 22 players it was a chance to showcase their ability."

Delaney is returning from an injury which kept him out for the final three months of last season, the defender suffered a knee injury in February that prematurely ended his campaign with Newport County and is still working his way back before Swindon throw him back into action.

Uwakwe also missed a large chunk of last season with an injury, a knee injury in October sidelined him for an extended period before picking up a fresh injury in training as he came back into the fold which saw him miss out on a return.

Aguiar was also not involved in the pre-season opener due to not being deemed ready to play, he was in and out of the side during the second half of last season having had a very fruitful loan spell with Worthing.