DORCHESTER Town manager Craig Laird has elaborated on his experimental team selection for Friday night’s 4-1 defeat to Evesham at the Avenue Stadium.

The normally right-sided Kyle Egan started at left-back, while attacking midfielder David Jerrard started on the wing as Laird assessed his options ahead of the club’s first league game at Banbury United on Saturday.

And Laird admitted the selection of the pacey Egan at left-back was to counteract the speed of Evesham on their right flank.

He told Echosport: “We knew they had a quick winger and we wanted to match him up with what we considered a quick full-back so we could go one v one out there and I wanted to see what Kyle was like that side.

“We’ve got Critt (Chris Clarke) and Neil (Martin) who are two good players, two natural left-sided players, but I wanted to see what we were like with a different shape.

“We might get injuries to those two and we need to see who can play out on the left-hand side for us if anything like that ever happened.”

Laird also felt the likes of Phil Ormrod and Tom Blair have been starved of service at times during pre-season.

He said: “There were some good bits in it, we played some nice football at times, maybe without finishing off as I’ve said before. How can I judge Phil or Tom when we’re not getting any quality in the box for them to try and score goals?

“We need to be getting that and giving them something that they can attack and then if they’re not scoring we can make a judgment on them.

“Sometimes rather than going in over confident and thinking ‘oh we’ll just turn up and play’, we know we’re going to have to roll our sleeves up and be organised and work really hard for each other before anything else.”