The Dragons recorded a 31-17 victory at Ealing in the team's first run out in pre-season, after weeks of pre-season conditioning work, Jackman was pleased to see his team come through the match without picking up any serious injuries and begin to combinations working together.
"We’ve had a good pre-season and we’ve done a lot of conditioning work but not so much contact work, so we saw these three pre-season friendlies as a chance to pick up on that," said Jackman.
"Today was a great opportunity to come down and get together to get that cohesion. When you bring in fourteen new players getting them to gel quickly, get combinations and relationships is the hard part and we’ve got to try and do that to the best of our ability to be ready for Benetton.
"Our collisions will get better, but I thought some of our kicking game and play was very good. We gave a chance to young players to get game time and everyone showed good intent, although we know we have a lot of work to do.
"It was great to have Jack Dixon back fit after he missed most of last season and he was captain today, he will be a massive player for us and also Nic Cudd who got injured in pre-season last year and missed the whole campaign so just seeing him back out there getting fifty minutes under his belt was really pleasing.
"We have no injuries which is brilliant. Over the next six, seven weeks is when you start getting injuries because people are in to contact again, so for every week that we get through without any big injuries is a big bonus.
"We’ve much more quality now, last year we didn’t have the experience or level of ability we needed. The Guinness PRO14 has got more internationals in it than any other league with some great teams in it so you need to have the talent to compete.
"People like Leon Brown, Elliot Dee and Aaron Wainwright have gone from being Dragons to Welsh internationals last year and now we’ve bought in more talent Rhodri Williams, Josh Lewis and Brandon Nansen for example who have more quality which means we can train better too.
"There are twelve players that could be considered starters or at least in our fore-thoughts for our match day 23 that weren’t here today and that’s a big change for us.
"We want to get them back and get players playing at their maximum potential and the next two weeks will tell a lot about who starts against Treviso.
"With our 23s playing RGC in a friendly next Saturday, we have the chance to give game time to 46 players next week with a nice balance against RGC and Northampton Saints at home.
"We’re hoping Leon Brown and a couple of others come back in for the match against Northampton Saints on Friday. Tavis Knoyle isn’t far away and Aaron Wainwright could come back in for Friday’s game against Saints, Ollie Griffiths isn’t that far away so we’ve got players coming back, although obviously we don’t have Ross until round 2."
