On the eve of the new Reserves season, we caught up with Jim Ryan - one half of the second-string's caretaker management team...

Do you envisage the Reserves squad being much bigger this season?
Yeah it looks like it. It's a little hard to tell exactly what the squad will be because quite a lot of the young boys are with the first team squad and I think the Manager intends to hold onto them in order to have a bigger first team squad. Our squad will certainly be bigger than last year, though, when we were pretty much down to the bare bones.

Will that be a welcome relief after having such a small squad last term?
There are two sides to that particular coin. The fact was that everybody managed to get games. Even the boys who weren't here were playing out on loan elsewhere, so it meant that more or less everybody was playing all the time. This season you'll have lots of players who have spend time on the substitutes bench.

How will you manage the players who are returning from loans?
What's happened is that they've moved up to work with the First Team group, so their next experience will be working at that level every day in training. People like Gerard Pique, Danny Simpson and Jonny Evans will be working at a higher level every day.

Should we expect many players to go out on loan this season?
It doesn't look as though there will be as many loans this year, but I think there'll be a couple more I would