Carlisle United rounded off their training week in Scotland with a match at Premiership side St. Mirren and came away with a creditable 2-2 draw.
Harrison Neal had opened the scoring with a fine finish, firing a shot into the bottom corner following a one-two with Charlie Wyke.
Toyosi Olusanya levelled proceedings at the start of the second-half, before James Scott nodded home to give them the lead from close range.
Soon after, Terell Thomas responded for United, powering home a header in front of the travelling support to restore parity asnd that’s how it stayed to the end.
Afterwards manager Paul Simpson told the club’s official new website: “I was pleased with the workout, that’s the thing. We’ve got a load of good things out of it. There’s signs where we still need to work on them a bit but it was a great workout as well as being great physical workout for us.
“I thought we showed some really good passages of play, and it was good to score two goals, which we didn’t do very often last year.
“But we just need to tighten up on things, which we know because there’s three weeks to go until the start of the season and we’ll just keep working on those. I thought that this was a really good way to go and cap off a really strong week of work up in St Andrews.
“We wanted players to get 60 minutes because when they’ve done 45, you can get through with that ok. The 60, 65 minutes, you start to get that second wind and you start to get a bit of a burning feeling in your chest and they’ve got to get through that to benefit from it.
“I was disappointed with the first goal because I said at half time we needed to work a bit harder to stop crosses because we had a little bit of a scare at the end of the first-half. I said we’ve got to work harder to stop crosses and we didn’t do it.
“They get a good ball in and it’s a good delivery and it’s a good header from Olusanya, but I think we should have stopped it. The second one, I don’t like that because the lad is free around the goalkeeper and we’ve worked on it and they say they’re comfortable, but we can’t afford to give things like that.
“I thought it was offside, but there’s a possibility it was one of our players who headed it, so maybe that’s why it wasn’t offside.
“But there’s things that we just need to keep working on and keep tightening up on and hopefully if we do, we’ll be ok.
“I do want to bring a couple more into the group just to pad it out and give us more numbers because you can see we’re a little bit short on what we need to take us through to January anyway.
“So hopefully we’ll be able to do it. As I said, we’ve got one coming in at the end of the month, when he comes back from their pre-season tour. Then it may be one, maybe two more to try and take it up to 25 in the squad.”
