Tough test for the U18 side
The United youth team travelled down to Blackburn for their penultimate pre-season friendly and they found themsleves up against some formidable opponents in what turned out to be a tough encounter.
"Blackburn were better than us and we have to hold our hands up to that today," head of youth Eric Kinder told us.
"They were ahead of us techinically and physically and they asked us a lot of questions. The lads will either learn from an experience like this or they won't, it really is as simple as that."
"I wanted to play a team like this because I wanted to see where we were at," he continued. "We knew what we were going up against and it has been a good and worthwhile day despite the result.
"There are always positives to take and the Spanish lad they had in goals had to make three or four terrific saves to keep his clean sheet. That's because we kept going and we didn't let our heads drop, and that's good to see. We didn't take our chances when they came and we've been punished, but that's football at any level.
"Overall though they moved the ball around really well and our target has to be to produce that level of football in our game if we possibly can. We have to acknowledge that Blackburn go out and buy a lot of their young players and that's the difference between them as a category 1 academy and us at category 3."
Good news came out of the trip for trial striker Greg Peel who has today agreed to sign a short-term contract which will keep him at the club until December.
"He's done well and worked hard," Kinder said. "His best performance for us was against Queen of the South last week and that's the kind of thing we hope to see more of in the coming months.
"We'll get his contract done and he'll be with us until Christmas. We can then take it from there."
Kinder had 22 players available for today's game and all were used at various stages throughout the 90 minutes.
The U18 pre-season concludes at Creighton on Tuesday evening when they face an Annan U20 side and their season starts in earnest next Saturday with their league opener at home to Accrington Stanley.