Mark Hughes was not downhearted his Blackburn Rovers side suffering a 5-0 defeat in their latest friendly outing against Olympiakos last night.

The Greek champions sent Rovers crashing to their heaviest defeat in Hughes' reign as manager but, after seeing his side outplayed for long spells, the Welshman was philosophical about the performance afterwards.

"You always get results like this in pre-season. The amount of changes we made did affect our shape at times," said Hughes.

"But it was a good exercise and the positive thing for us is we got more game time into the players' legs.

"It's important that the squad has played a certain amount of minutes before the season starts so they are getting up to the levels they need to be at.

"It's still early days for us yet."

Aside from the result, the other downsides for Hughes were injuries to Peter Enckelman (ankle) and David Bentley (stitches in his foot), the former falling awkwardly during the warm-up, which ruled him out of the game.

Hughes added: "It started badly and didn't improve in that respect.

"But it was a different exercise for us. They were obviously looking to play the majority of their first team for longer periods than I was.

"I was just looking to give players more minutes on the football field."