YASER Kasim has stressed the need for Swindon Town to quickly adopt a collective identity to compensate for their lack of numbers and experience, ahead of the start of the new League One term next month.

The midfielder, who with just a single full season of first-team football under his belt is now one of the senior players in the Town squad, believes the Robins’ young side must settle on a shared footballing philosophy and stick to it over the course of the campaign.

That way, the Iraqi international feels Swindon will be able to counter teams jam-packed with seasoned know-how and older players, as they bid to replicate their surprise successes of last season.

He told the Advertiser: “We have to have an identity – an identity in that we know what we’re going to go out on the pitch and do. We have to dominate all the time. Each player has their own identity and role within the team. They have to focus on that and make sure it’s happening week in, week out.

“If you’re not having a great game you have to up your fitness, you have to make more tackles, you have to make more runs for the team, you have to be a lot more selfless – but we have to have an identity.

“We don’t want to go into the season and mix and match – some games do this and some do that. No. Everybody knows what they’re doing and we have a philosophy. If it’s not working out we will realise what it is because we’ve got the system in place.

“You look at the video, say this is going wrong. We’ve got to have an identity, I think that is very important because it doesn’t look like we’re going to have a big squad, which could work in our favour.”

When asked whether he would be happy to start the season tomorrow, with the current crop of players at the County Ground, he said: “We still need a bit more time. I could say I’m happy now but I’d be lying because we need to work a bit more. It’s not necessarily the players; it’s the system, the way we’re playing – we’ve got to get it to the next level.

“I think we could have dominated a bit more against South ampton. They’re a good side, a Premier League side but I felt we could have dominated a bit more. That’s why we’ve got to work on it so when we play Scunthorpe on August 9 we dominate the game.

“It doesn’t matter who we’re playing, home or away, we need to dominate the game.”