Brighton & Hove manager Chris Hughton is happy with his squad ahead of the new season and admitted he saw a lot of positives in his side's double-header defeats to Luton and Stevenage, as reported by the club's "?official website.
Hughton was pleased to be able to give more minutes for first team regulars in Brighton's narrow 2-1 and 1-0 defeat on Saturday afternoon.
Hughton said: "I'm certainly glad of the way we did it because it allowed us to get nearly all of the senior players close to 90 minutes. "Results wise it hasn't been the best, but that's not the most important thing, even though you don't want to lose any games.
"The important thing is we've got two games to go and have got a really important day's work under our belts.
"In both games we had some good work on the ball, but without threatening enough.
"That's probably been lacking. We haven't got ourselves into enough goalscoring opportunities."
With most of the Seagulls' squad playing 90-minute games, Hughton will be hoping his side will be ready to raise their intensity levels in their opening game of the season.
"Every manager will tell you that you can have good pre-seasons and not so good pre-seasons, but as soon as that whistle goes in the first game, the intensity becomes a bit different.
"From a fitness point of view, we still have two weeks to go and most of the players have played 90-minute games,"? Hughton revealed.
David Stockdale and Jiri Skalak returned to the squad, while Dale Stephens was ruled out with a knee injury.
"Stocko has missed a chunk of pre-season; while from a fitness point of view, Jiri is okay and hasn't missed a lot of football, but we chose only to give him 45 minutes.
"Dale should be available for Tuesday. He wanted to play today and it was us who stopped him because we thought we could give him an extra recovery day.
"We're just a touch short of where we want to be. We're certainly in a much better position than we were last season in terms of numbers. We just need to supplement it with one or two."?
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