By: Kevin Kemboi
Players sprawled on a pitch in searing heat after running until they drop. Elsewhere, fans are melting, too fretting at the omens as their team is hammered in an overseas tournament. Then there are the managers. Sweating as they attempt to implement new philosophies as the clock ticks towards the big kick-off.
With the summer warm-up period subject to greater scrutiny than ever. ‘Beasting’ players in such a way is considered out of step with modern sport science. But earlier in June, Antonio Conte’s Tottenham players were pushed through a running session involving 42 laps of the pitch in 30C (86F) heat, as fans watched a training session in Seoul.
It appeared so tough that Harry Kane threw up, and when it was all over Son Heung-min had to be dragged to his feet from where he lay. It turns out that even for the Premier League’s finely tuned athletes, sometimes there is no substitute for hard, horrible work. During the relatively brief break players get between competitive games, it’s still possible to see significant dips in the fitness levels required to play at a high level.
David Moyes was famously quoted saying , ‘I want to know what’s in their hearts’. He wanted to know if the players would be with him in the last five minutes of a hard game when everyone was tired. Would they put their lives on the line and keep going? Every pre-season there’d be new players, so we’d have to do it again to test their character. “You can see he still always values that type of character who’ll give you every last drop in training; from Tomas Soucek back to the likes of Leon Osman. Actually, it’s what Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola want as well.
Many coaches believe that a player’s willingness to “suffer” is key to knowing the characters he can count on. Some of the players coming through academies now are not running hard enough, so by the time they get to us they get to the crème de la crème of football they haven’t learned how to suffer. It’s that ability to tolerate a certain amount of pain or strain and be able to dig in. At the early stage of pre-season, the players aren’t ready to be twisting and turning and running explosively, so that’s when the horseshoe and the 12-minute runs come in. It’s about pushing through the threshold of discomfort, sitting in that place and ultimately being able to perform.
Running is a skill. To become economical at shifting your body over a distance. You need to become good at it it’s not just about running for the sake of it until you drop. It ensure that the players are ready for that first game.
Jurgen Klopp said after his side lost their opening pre-season game 4-0 against Manchester United in Bangkok. “We were sometimes in a rush, sometimes too high, but with the way Man Utd defended in a man-marking system, especially in midfield, we lost the balls in the wrong moment, gave the balls away and they finished the situations off. That was the obvious stuff we have to improve, even if we’d won 4-0.
“It’s just the start of pre-season and now we carry on.” Klopp wasn’t losing any sleep, but some fans were. It is the modern way, when friendly results especially defeats to high-profile rivals trigger panic. But do the results matter at all? Liverpool losing to United was not a big concern, because Klopp was using lots of players, giving them all 30 minutes. It was purely about fitness and building up the game time. That’s pre-season for you. on different pitches.
What constitutes a successful pre-season then?
It’s getting through it without any injuries, embedding your new players and having a high overall level of fitness. Then the season begins and the real work starts.
John Kariuki