Tony Mowbray did not rule out signing Charlie Adam after he impressed in Rovers’ opening pre-season friendly win at Barrow on Saturday.

The former Stoke and Liverpool man played the second half of the 2-1 victory at Holker Street having trained at Brockhall for the start of pre-season.

While initially a fitness arrangement, Mowbray says he will sit down and have a chat with the 33-year-old Scot in the coming days about his future.

The Rovers boss also revealed that he isn’t the only non-contracted player currently with the squad, out-of-favour Derby man Jacob Butterfield having also been training.

“We’ll wait and see,” said Mowbray after the win over the Bluebirds.

“I don’t want to get drawn into what we’re going to do about it because he hit some lovely passes today.

“We’ll see how he goes next week in training.

“We’ve got a few players that I know, Jacob Butterfield is training with us at the moment as well.

“It’s mainly somewhere to give them somewhere to train and get fit.

“We’ll see how the week goes and then we’ll have chats and see what we think about it at the end of it.

“As we move towards the start of the season we need to hone in on our XI and our team.”

Mowbray says the arrangement was initiated by Adam and the decision for him to play in Cumbria only taken late in the day to make up numbers.

The midfielder’s quality in the game was obvious, but that did not surprise the Rovers boss.

“Charlie phoned me a few days ago and asked if he could come in and train,” Mowbray said.

“He knows a few of the lads and I said ‘no problem’.

“One of our young players Brad Lyons picked up a groin injury yesterday.

“Brad would have played and we needed to fill in with the bodies because I was going to play two lots of 45 minutes.

“I asked Charlie if he wanted to fill in and he said ‘yeah fine’ because that’s the sort of kid he is.

“We put him on the pitch and he did pretty well spraying the ball around second half.

“You get high quality football with the ball at his feet. He can hit a pass anywhere he wants on the pitch really.

“With total respect to Barrow though, there’s not many Barrows in the Championship who when they have the ball will give us a lot more problems.”