GLEN Driver said there would be a hard week of training for his players after seeing Braintree Town beaten in their final outing of pre-season.

Braintree are due to head to Bath City on Saturday for their opening fixture in the Vanarama National League South and closed their summer preparations with a 2-0 defeat by National League North side King's Lynn Town.

Driver admitted that his team weren't up to the standards he expected of them, however, he didn't agree with the assessment of some that he had encountered who felt there had been a gulf between the sides.

Instead, he felt the game showed the difference between a team that had been a unit for several seasons already compared to his Iron group that had only been brought together this summer and hoped fans could be pragmatic about the situation the club found itself in.

He said: "I heard a few people in the clubhouse afterwards saying King's Lynn were miles better than us, but I don't agree with that.

"What you could see was that they are a group who have been together for three years.

"People have to be realistic about where we are.

"I am and I'm glad that the chairman is because, while we know where we are short, we know how far we have come.

"We will continue working hard this week and there will be a few changes to the squad still going on because we have to.

"We have to keep looking and tweaking things.

"We have to be clever with the squad because we don't have a reserve team where players on the fringe of the side can go so we are still looking.

"I think there may be a couple more in for Saturday and that will mean a couple may have to move on because we have such a tight budget."

While Driver didn't feel his team were vastly outclassed by the visitors from Norfolk, though, I did acknowledge that his players hadn't met the standards both in and out of possession that he wanted to see and had been seeing during the rest of their pre-season action.

"It was probably the worst we have passed the ball," he added.

"In all of the pre-season games, we have got the ball down and played some really good football, but we were sloppy in possession and out of it.

"I was disappointed by that.

"Since we've been her, we have had a philosophy that we want to be good when we have the ball, but better when we haven't and on Saturday, things we had drilled into the lads didn't happen. "We were not good enough with it and not good without it and that wasn't what we wanted just one week away from going to Bath.

"We now have a busy week with the boys to make sure we are better than that.

"It has been a really tough pre-season, but it's one that I know people at the club have had before when they have had to completely rebuild squads from scratch in the same way.

"So we have found it tough and we know have a week of training to prepare for Bath.

"To be honest, we have had to have a lot of games to make sure the new group could gel together, but the flip side of that is that we have not had an awful lot of training sessions to work with the boys.

"But we will get a chance for training sessions now when we can work on things that we feel we need to and we will be positive heading into the season.

"Being positive is the only way I know how to be.

"When people ask me how we did on Saturday (against King's Lynn), I will be brutally honest and say that, as a group - not just as a team but including the management as well - we could have been better. "There were a few things we missed on the side and some things we have to look at and it is all leading up to Bath away on Saturday."