Reed will be keen to hit ground running when Leighton Town return

Reed is yet to oversee a pre-season with the Reds having only joined the club in November, but impressive form since his arrival nearly had Leighton pushing for a play-off spot come April.

So he will be keen to hit the ground running in July once the players return if Leighton are to go one better next time around.

Reed told the club’s media: “The players can expect a lot of running and a lot of football – we’ve got five games we’re targeting as I’m not a big fan of having ten or 11 games planned in and having to cancel a couple of days before because half of your squad are not fit for whatever reason.

"So we’ll strategically plan it. I’m lucky in the sense that from where I’ve been before, there is a strong sport science, medical and nutritional, side to it, so we’ve got to factor all of those bits in.

"You can’t control everything with these boys but they’ll be given certain programmes and they’ll come back in for pre-season on June 26 and there will be a lot of shape work, social building and fitness incorporated into it as well.

"We’ll have some games lined up that hopefully people will look at and want to come and watch, but we’ve got to embed our philosophy because it’s really hard to do that during the season when games are coming thick and fast.

"So pre-season will allow us to have that time, use the pitch here to hopefully get our pitch geography right as well, and hopefully we’ll have the benefits of that because if you look at our points per game in the first 20 games it was about 1.2 points per game.

"But from games 21 to 40 it was over two points per game, so it clearly shows that if you don’t hit the ground running then you’re forever playing catch-up and I don’t want us to be in that situation next year, I want us to be amongst the top sides.” ​