Tony Mowbray believes Indian teenager Aniket Jadhav will have benefited hugely from training with the Rovers first team.

The 18-year-old was invited to spend four months training at the Academy base at Brockhall by the club’s owners.

Jadhav, who plays for Jamshedpur FC in India, also spent an afternoon training with Mowbray’s squad, something the first team boss will serve him well when he returns to his club.

“He came up and trained one afternoon and I think that would benefit him – playing with experienced professional footballers at Championship level,” said the manager.

“He’s only a young boy, but he showed that he had good basics to his game and he was able to join in with the session.

“He was enthusiastic, he worked hard with the group and hopefully he enjoyed it.

“I’m sure the daily training at the Academy will have helped him.

“When he came up to train with us, I’m sure the messages I was giving him was something he was getting every day down at the Academy.

“I would hope that the professional level of coaching he got at an elite level Academy will stand him in good stead for the future and create habits that will hopefully become rooted and become part of the foundation of his career.”

The Rao family took charge of Rovers in November 2011,but this is the first time such an invitation has been extended.

Mowbray admits the potential for growth in Asian football is ‘huge’, but not something that will happen overnight.

And the Rovers boss feels Jadhav will take plenty from his time in East Lancashire.

He told the club website: “The fine detail of football is what matters.

The ability to receive the ball on the half-turn or the weight of your pass.

I call them the building blocks of your career. Basic football skills that the best players you don’t even notice they do it, but they all do it naturally.

“Those basics, you have to repetitively drill into young players.

You have to embed them in and so the period of time he spent training in a professional environment will help him cement some of those habits into his natural game.”