Stags hoping on early getaway and friendly

“We are back in on the 27th,” said Murray. “We will do the same as last year and have the first week at Brooksby College.

“The club are trying to sort us out a few days somewhere, hopefully somewhere nice down Torquay or somewhere and we’ll get a friendly down there.

“It will be good for the fans too to have a little journey away. So we are working on that.”

He added: “We had a couple of our pre-season games cancel on us last week. A few of those teams were playing in the play-offs so they’ve changed their mind due to their results.

“But we’ve had some good clubs come in that want to play so hopefully we’ll get them concrete.

“It’s getting a balance. I think you need your games that are realistic to League Two. But you also want some better games to test out not just our ability with the ball but also our ability without the ball.

“We want to be tested. We want to know that when we come up against the better teams in League Two, that we can rely on our organisation and shape to win games. We did that a lot last year so we need to make sure we’ve nailed that.

“At the same time we’ve got games in which we can go out and express ourselves and work on our attacking pitches as well.”

Murray said he was delighted with how his summer business had gone so far.

“It’s been really good. I don’t think it could have gone any better,” he smiled.

“We know who we want and what we want. There is probably one we’re still chasing after we lost out on a couple.

“We’ve got our targets that we’ve wanted so far, planning’s going well and the summer is going quick. We’ve only three weeks until we’re back in, though I wanted to get started already.

“We have improved so far on the standard on paper at least of where we were last year. We are really confident in the signings we’ve brought in.

“I think we’ve brought a little bit of X-Factor into the group but, at the same time, we’ve brought some good characters. The big thing is we’ve brought in a couple of people that have won this league. I think we have improved.”