Tuesday 2 July 2013

A look ahead to pre-season

Yesterday, the players began their second week of pre-season training, in preparation for a match against Alfreton Town and a tour of Ireland. But what will pre-season have in store for us?


Whilst good results would provide important confidence boosts for our young team and be pleasing for us, the fans, it’s not the be all and end all. The key will be putting in encouraging performances, getting players back up to full fitness, and introducing another crop of youth players to the first team squad. I would be happier if we do all of these things and drew every game, than do none of them and win.

Fitness is a vital issue. Just 11 players in the squad who will be available to play this summer, are those who made 5 or more appearances for us last season. 7 of them are into their 30s, and 3 of them – Mullins, Lovenkrands and King – have been made available for a free transfer! We are very limited in terms of strength in depth, so our players will be required to play week in, midweek, week out constantly, thus attaining full fitness will be essential.


Another factor will be integration. We have brought in 6 (soon to be 8) new faces this summer, which may fill in some of the gaps left by those departed. But each of them will inevitably need time to settle. Although, it seems that this summer’s squad overhaul won’t be as dramatic as the previous two – and it’s happening earlier.

Last season, we got off to such a poor start because Clark only came in almost a year ago today. This season, he’s already sorted out most of his squad, so pre-season will be a time for improving the general cohesion of the team, rather than redesigning the team itself.

The final factor will be the introduction of youth. The structuring of our pre-season schedule gives me an inkling that our younger players, even those who didn’t make a name for themselves last season, will be given a chance. Our opening two friendly matches are 2 days apart, yet looking at our squad, I’d estimate estimated that we’ll only have around 17 players who can be regarded as part of the first team at the moment. It may be less depending on when the loan signings, likely to be Dan Burn and Kyle Bartley, are confirmed.

At very least, we’ll need 22 players to be able to sufficiently compete in these games, on a physical level. Either we’ll split the squad into two groups to play separate matches, or the whole squad will play 45 minutes each in both games. It’ll be interesting to see how Clark approaches this, especially considering we have another match played behind closed doors shortly afterwards. What’s for certain is that Clark will have to promote certain members of our youth team, as a temporary measure to fill in the space.

We have decent a gap of 9 days from the Shamrock friendly, to the run up to August. We play Swindon on the 17th, then have 4 friendlies in 10 days before the Watford game. Therefore, my theory is that part 1 of our pre-season innings, Clark will use largely as a time to assess the quality of our undiscovered youngsters, such as Ryan Higgins and Reece Hales. He can then finalise his decisions on the best way forward, whether to move them into the development squad, send them out on loan, or further introduce them to the first team in the latter friendly matches.

As fans, we inevitably want to see our team win. But I don’t want us to attach to much importance to our results this summer, as assembling the basic infrastructure of our team for next season must hold emphasis. The integration of the squad in terms of the youngsters and new signings, and our key players returning to fitness, should be paramount in Clark’s thoughts.

By Gabriel Sutton

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