Bristol Rovers are close to adding two new coaches to Joey Barton's backroom staff with the arrival of former Liverpool goalkeeper Tony Warner and Burnley strength and conditioning coach Tom Short, Bristol Live understands.
Rovers have been without a goalkeeper coach since the departure of David Coles in May and Warner is set to join the Gas for pre-season, with the squad - minus first-choice Anssi Jaakkola due to his time spent away with Finland at Euro 2020 - currently at Bisham Abbey.
Jed Ward is the only first-team goalkeeper who has reported back for pre-season although the club are also running the rule over a number of triallists in that position and who could feature in Friday's first pre-season game against Melksham Town.
Training Ground Guru first reported Rovers' interest in Warner, with the 47-year-old most recently at League One Accrington Stanley, and confirmation of his role is soon to be confirmed.
Meanwhile, Short is poised to join from Premier League Burnley with Barton having worked alongside him during his time as a player at Turf Moor between 2015 and 2016.
Short has been with the Clarets for eight years with Burnley's consistent Premier League status a result of their collective fitness levels which always stand out in the top-flight. His arrival in north Bristol can be seen as a considerable coup for the club.
Barton has frequently cited fitness as the foundation to Burnley's promotion-winning campaign in 2015/16 as while they may not have been the most talented side, they always out-worked and ultimately dominated teams in the final 15 minutes of matches.
Head of medical services Miles Warren and head of sport science Alun Andrews were among those to depart the club last month, as Barton launched an overhaul of that aspect of the club citing fitness levels as one of the underlying reasons why the Gas under-performed so catastrophically last term.
He wants the Gas to be the fittest team in League Two next season and has promised a challenging pre-season campaign to instil those standards early on in the campaign.
"We're going to need to be the best team in the division in the sense, we might not have the best players, but we're going to be the best team and in the upper echelons of the fitness bracket, if not the best", Barton told Bristol Live at the start of May.
"The good teams I played in we tended to be the fittest in the division. Certainly at Burnley, we won a lot of games on fitness.
"Down the back-end, I remember Brighton away, we were getting the ball popped around us for 60-65 minutes but we knew physically we had done the work and we could physically get back at them.
"And lo and behold we were all over them in the last quarter of the game and ended up scoring two goals, albeit only one of them counted because one was ruled out falsely.
"And that was the turning point in us in the Championship and maybe not finishing second or third and going into the play-offs. And fitness was the difference.
"Of course, you need quality, you need good players, but you've got to be fit. Fitness is your business as a footballer."
