SWINDON Town manager Mark Cooper is pleased with the progression his side have made during pre-season as they head into their final week of preparation before the season kicks off.

Town concluded their run of friendlies this afternoon with a 2-1 defeat at home to Premier League outfit Liverpool.

Despite having secured only one win in their seven games, a 3-2 success away to Petersfield, Cooper is happy with what he has seen, with Town more than holding their own on a number of occasions against Premier League opposition.

Town now have less than a week to prepare for Saturday’s curtain raiser at home to Bradford City and the Swindon boss was content with what he had seen on display this afternoon.

“I think we’ve slowly but surely improved along the way,” he told the local media.

“I thought, in patches today, we showed what we could do against a pretty strong Liverpool team.

“The further along we’ve gone, the better we’ve got.

“We’ve had to change a lot of things. It’s more or less a new team with a little bit of a different season.

“It’s taken a lot of work but over the last couple of games I’ve thought it’s started to come good.

“I thought we looked like a good football team, in terms of our ball retention, and some of our football was very good.

“It’s difficult to score goals against a team with quality like that and we managed to score a really good goal to level it up. I’m really pleased.”