MARK Cooper has offered his thanks to Lydiard Park Academy for allowing his Swindon Town squad to train on their 3G facility during the poor recent weather.

With Town’s Liddington training base flooded and the pitches there unplayable, Cooper turned to Lydiard and their artificial playing surfaces as the next best resort.

While the likes of Tijane Reis and Troy Archibald-Henville are unable to train on 3G due to the fragility of their knees as they recover from surgery, Cooper stressed that it was the next best option to practising on grass.

He said: “We haven’t been able to get anywhere near Liddington so we’ve been up at Lydiard Academy, who have kindly let us use their 3G pitch and after grass that’s the next best thing.

“For me it’s not ideal but we’d be well and truly snookered without it at the moment and they’ve been very kind letting us use it.

“We’ve got a flat surface that we can train on, we’re not going to moan about it, we’ll do our best and prepare as well as we can.”