Full time: Town 0 Toon 1

Chris Hughton (or Huyton, if you believe the programme editor) commented:

"As you get towards the last few games of pre-season, you have to start getting a possible starting line-up in mind. You have to do that. 

"I have to cover all eventualities. I’m still under the opinion that at some stage, someone will come in and a new manager will take over. It will then be his responsibility. But until that happens, I have got to start planning for the start of the season.

"I will be investigating the (Beye) incident today. But sometimes it’s nice to have that bit of edge on the pitch - at times it didn’t look like much of a friendly.

"That’s the nature of the game. You have got players who care out there and sometimes they over step the mark – but that’s part and parcel of the game. 

You’d rather have a game where the players care, and that is what happened with that incident. The referee didn’t ask me to take Habib off – I was always going to do that.

Meanwhile, the club will begin life in the second tier without Butt, who is set for an operation on the hand that he broke at Neasham Road on Saturday.

On the Butt injury:

"It’s a blow – a big blow. Not only he is a fabulous player, he doesn’t miss many games and he’s an excellent personality to have around the dressing room.

"Of course, he will still be around but he’s the kind of player that you want out there on the pitch. We haven’t really had any injuries in pre-season and it was fairly innocuous, so it is disappointing.

On new player recruitment:

"At the moment I’m not thinking like that. At this moment, this is the group of lads we’ve got. If you told whoever starts the season as manager that they had these lads, they’d be happy with this squad."

Town boss Lee Clark said:

“I thought we passed the ball around pretty well in the first half but, in the second, our retention was not what I wanted and we gave it away too easily.

“We had to put a lot of effort in against quality opposition who made us work hard, so our fitness levels will have improved a great deal, especially as we had to chase the ball for quite a lot of the second half.

“When we did get on the ball I thought we created two or three chances which we might have capitalised on and I’ve said to the lads that we just need to show a bit more belief in certain situations and we will be fine.”

"It was just a competitive match. It wasn’t played in a friendly manner whatsoever because both teams were very committed with players wanting to do their best for their clubs.

“That’s what you want. I would rather have that than a game played at testimonial pace with no-one tackling each other. Lee (Novak) had blood on his face and a cut on his chin (after a late clash with Coloccini) but it’s got to be a contact sport. It’s just football.”

Biffa