A planned training game at Stevenage against a Premier League club was pulled in advance - as the demands of the top-flight side proved too difficult to accomplish in a short period of time.

Steve Evans had revealed plans for the game after the 0-0 draw at Sutton United.

But while the League Two side did not get the game they wanted, the whole point of the exercise was to get minutes into the legs of some of his squad, something that was still achieved to the great satisfaction of the Boro boss.

Evans said: "On Monday, the demands of what they needed in terms of security and different things were all going to be too much for us at short notice.

"It doesn't sound [like that should be] the case but it is if they're bringing the big boys.

"We couldn't do that but we did have an in-house game which was great. The boys that needed it got 70 minutes and the others trained.

"It was excellent for what we needed. It was solely to get them game time.

"They went out there and really enjoyed playing, there was a number of them who hadn't had that 70, 80 minutes of competitive football for a while and they were all speaking afterwards about how much they enjoyed it.

"So that was good and we said that allows competition for a place on Saturday [at home to Bradford City].

"We'd have rather had the Premier League club because of the competitiveness and we would have done a lot more work off the ball but we got a lot out of Tuesday as well.

"Next time we will realise that if we are playing a club of that structure when they bring some of their so-called stars, we'll make sure that we've got a little bit of time to plan properly."