PREPARE FOR SUCCESS

GONE ARE THE DAYS OF FOOTBALLERS RUNNING UP HILLS IN PRE-SEASON, THERE IS A LOT MORE SCIENCE INVOLVED THESE DAYS

- By Mark Gleeson

It used to be that preseason was a necessary evil; Spartan bootcamps hated by footballers but important to build the foundation of fitness to see players through an exacting campaign.

The approach was almost universally archaic and the methods, many times drawn from military experience, often brutal, with players pushed to the limits in the misguided belief that the harder they trained the fitter they became.

Some of it was plainly cruel, too, like when the diminutive former Scottish international Gordon Strachan, who had played under Alex Ferguson, took his Southampton squad to St Andrews, Scotland, for preseason preparations.

“The golfers in the team were excited, they thought we would be staying at the Old Course, the posh hotel, playing a few rounds. Instead, we were in student accommodation across the road from the beach and Gordon had us running up sand dunes all day.

It was horrendous,” remembers Francis Benali, who spent 16 seasons with the Saints and is now best known for his ultra-marathon running.

From the same genre are yarns of the Wimbledon “Crazy Gang” training with the army and on an exercise where they camped overnight and had to attack a fort in the morning, descending into real fighting where punches were thrown.

There are also tales of enlightened workouts – notably Bill Shankly replacing the heavy running work Liverpool players did in preseason with a homemade test he called the Sweat Box.

It involved four wooden boards the size of goals, and players working in pairs to pass and shoot in different directions and angles. It is an early example of using ball work for conditioning and Shankly’s Sweat Box invention sounds not unlike a prototype for modern, multimillion-pound training tools like the SoccerBot360.

These days, there are GPS vests and blood tests, rather than sand dunes and booze sweats, with preseason no longer a player’s nightmare.