Minutes were also increased for first-team substitutes, with James McArthur and Will Hughes taking to the field 15 minutes earlier than in midweek against Gillingham.
Assistant manager Osian Roberts explained these increases have been planned across pre-season as the club played its penultimate friendly before returning to the Premier League.
The result, he says, is that the team is feeling fit as the friendlies schedule draws to a close.
Roberts explained: “It’s important that players, as many as possible, got 90 minutes, which they did, and that that intensity was returning to our game at the level we expect. So we’re really pleased with that work ethic and attitude in stepping up that intensity we need going into the last two weeks.
“We’ve built it up progressively from 45 [minutes] to 60 and then into 75s before today… Today I was hoping we could get really good output from the players both physically and in terms of technically and tactically, starting to get into a rhythm. And we got that for the majority of the game.
“We needed to take that next step up in terms of pre-season: we’ve been in for four weeks now. It’s time, getting into that fourth week, that we saw the fruit of the hard work that’s taken place for the last few weeks.”