Quality time with players gives Rotherham United manager the chance to drive ideas home

The players report back in today for two days of tests before getting out on the grass and knuckling down to work on Monday.

The time between now and the start of the season on August 2 gives manager Matt Hamshaw, only a few months into the job, the chance to start really getting his ideas across to the players free of the pressures of chasing league points.

The pre-season takes in a week-long summer camp in Portugal and plenty of training days in between the pre-season friendlies.

Rotherham had the reputation as a direct team under previous manager Steve Evans but Hamshaw wants the style to be more fluid in League One next season.

“It will be a hybrid. We’ll have different ways of playing,” he said.

“Obviously I had to come in at the end of last season and get results.

“I know people will say we weren’t ever going to go down but there was still danger around so I had to come in and adapt a way of play to fit the circumstances.”

Hamshaw has a reputation has a good coach but this will be the first pre-season he has started as a senior team manager and he is relishing it.

“In the eight matches I was in charge at the end of last season I was able to input a lot of what I wanted to see in possession but if I’m going to be 100 per cent honest I did no out-of-possession work because I felt we just didn’t have the fitness levels to go and do exactly what I wanted to do out of possession.

“There is going to be contrasts and a lot of different ways of going about things from now on and that’s what excites me.

"It’s an opportunity for me to put a mark on this team and the style I want.”