It's the players of Carlisle United as you’ve never seen them before.

They may be captured most weeks during the football season pulling faces on the pitch – but this time they’ve been caught on camera mimicking their favourite animals and emojis.

The images of the Blues stars were taken during filming at Brunton Park for Nickelodeon’s children’s football TV programme Nick Kicks.

The show is billed as a “live-action football programme” which covers all 72 clubs of the Football League.

Producers from the show spent the day with a range of United players and managed to wrestle them away from training drills to get them to monkey around pitchside.

The funny segment will hit the screen at 8am today.

A Nickelodeon spokeswoman said: “For this Saturday’s episode, players Michael Raynes, Luke Joyce, Alexander McQueen and Jason Kennedy took part in Nick Kicks’ ‘First 11’ section.

“The players had to answer a series of quick-fire football-related questions and give their best emoji and animal impressions.”

During the Q&A session the players also reveal some intriguing dressing room secrets such as who is the biggest joker, who has the worst haircut and who their favourite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle is.

The players come back with a number of mixed answers – except for who manager Keith Curle’s favourite player was.

Unanimously they told the show it was Danny Grainger while recently-released Bastien Hery got the vote for having the worst barnet – or haircut.

It’s not the first time that the Blues have been featured on the programme either.

In March presenters and cameramen from the TV channel took over Brunton Park to give nine-year-old superfan Emily McDougall a dream day with two of her favourite Blues players.

Striker Jabo Ibehre and midfielder Joyce were in on a surprise which saw them dress up as the club’s mascot Olga and a cameraman’s assistant.

Emily believed she’d been brought to the stadium to talk to the News & Star about her love of all things Carlisle United and have her picture taken.

During a pitchside interview presenter Rachel Stringer jumped in and interrupted proceedings to tell unsuspecting Emily that she was being filmed for the show.

Then in a further twist, Jabo pulled off the mascot’s head to reveal himself underneath with Joyce also stepping forward to show he wasn’t the camera assistant that Emily believed he was.