Lancaster City squad have work to do going into new season

The Dolly Blues’ preparations for the new Northern Premier League campaign continued with a 3-1 win against Preston North End’s youngsters at Giant Axe.

Nico Evangelinos, Jake Connelly and Dom Lawson were on target for City, backing up last weekend’s 2-0 defeat of Widnes FC.

While happy enough with the win, Fell admitted there were elements of his side’s performance which needed improvement.

He said: “It was a weird game, one of those I need to see again.

“It was quite open. When Dom Lawson came on for example, he hit bar, post and scored, so we created a lot of chances but we didn’t have as much of the ball – or we weren’t as careful with the ball and we didn’t have as much security with the ball – as I would have liked us to have.

“On the transition, we put three, four, five decent passes and did something really silly or really sloppy and that’s something we want to try and rectify in the next week or so.”

Overshadowing that, however, was an injury to substitute Christian Sloan during the second half.

While the severity of the injury is unknown at present, the Dolly Blues’ boss is resigned to losing Sloan’s services for a period of time.

“He’s one of the players that gives us a spark of energy and he gave that tonight when he came on,” Fell added.

“We looked a different team when Christian came on. He’s had a very decent pre-season as a lot of them have.

“It was a fairly innocuous challenge I thought, just a bit of a clash in the box.

“I don’t know the medical side of it but I know there’s concern from our guys and he’s going to go to hospital.

“We obviously need to make sure he’s well first and foremost – and then we need to look at the rehabilitation and how long that’s going to take, but it looks like it’s one that’s going to keep him out for a while.”