News

First Team Manager's Message: Pre-Season

20 Jun 22

First Team Manager, Kevin Adair, shares his thoughts ahead of tomorrow's official start to pre-season training.

"Apart from the games during the season, pre-season is the most important thing. It can have a big influence on how you start and having a good start is exactly what I’d like to see. You get to adapt and define your structure and set up for the upcoming schedule and it’s when you get the most time together on the training ground.

By the time you come to the competitive games you want to be somewhere close to full fitness as well as being able to understand your roles and responsibilities in the side. You learn all of this in the pre-season. Of course you learn in the season, we will continue to adapt but the better the base we provide ourselves with the better I believe the season will be.

We start our busy schedule with games against some top sides which will test us mentally as well as physically. Our job for now is to get the group understanding what we want in terms of attitude and fitness levels and then as the season gets closer we will spend more time on the tactical side of the game.

Our ability to adapt is going to be key as we embark on our campaign in the Combined Counties League; a move that came as an inconvenience to us seeing as the club have already experienced this fate before now on a few occasions. It has meant that a bit of the work we had done wasn’t as relevant to ourselves anymore but these things are out of our hands so we now just need to focus on the aspects we can control and we look forward to returning to the CCL."