Lemonade Money
Les Medley
http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/jul/21/swansea-city-garry-monk-pre-season-fitness
Leon Britton stands in his ‘Snoozebox’ at Swansea’s training ground. The club has installed 30 of them for players to sleep in between sessions. Photograph: Aled Llywelyn/for the Guardian
Garry Monk is stood in the centre of the training pitch, far enough away from the players running around the perimeter so as not to be breathing down their neck but close enough to see everything and not miss a trick. “Boys, don’t wait for each other,” Swansea City’s manager says as Wayne Routledge, Nathan Dyer, Bafétimbi Gomis, André Ayew, Marvin Emnes, Modou Barrow and Eder open up into a sprint.
It is just after 10am, a few rays of sunshine are breaking through the cloudy skies above and Swansea’s players are beginning to get a sweat on as pre-season training gets serious. “Push to the line, all the way,” Monk shouts. “Don’t sell yourselves short.”
There are four double sessions a week during the start of pre-season and today is one of them. Training in the morning is fitness-orientated and the afternoon drills revolve around the ball. During the four-hour break in between each session many of the players get their head down at the training ground … in an inflatable hotel room.
Monk gives the impression that he never sleeps – and not because he has three young children. The man who led Swansea to eighth place in the Premier League last season is a fiercely ambitious workaholic. He talks a lot about “accountability” and the importance of creating a working culture where there are no excuses for staff or players, and it is easy to see what he means.
This is a club where they monitor sleep patterns at home to check their players are in the best condition to perform. They have even invested in a drone that films training sessions from above so that every angle is covered when they trawl back through the footage – as they do at the end of each day – and edit the clips to highlight what worked well and what could have been done better as part of their feedback to the players.
Nothing is left to chance at Swansea, as the Guardian discovered when we were granted access to go behind the scenes for a day at the club’s training ground to see the level of work that goes into preparing for the start of a new Premier League campaign.
The fascinating insight begins with Jonny Northeast, Swansea’s head of sport science and fitness, holding a meeting with the players at 9.30am. With Monk and the rest of the staff looking on, Northeast debriefs the squad on how they performed in the previous day’s fitness exercise, which focused on “powerful changes of direction”. He puts up a graphic showing where every player ranked, from highest to lowest, according to the GPS data that traces every step.
Kyle Bartley is assessed in the Swansea City gym – the club has a backroom staff that looks into everything from the players’ sleep patterns to each step made in training. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/for the Guardian
Northeast goes on to explain that this morning’s drill will be a fartlek session, which involves sprinting for short bursts – the longest run is from the 18-yard line to the halfway line – and jogging in between. Half the players will be running around the perimeter of the pitch for seven laps in small groups, while the other half complete five laps of a longer circuit. Both exercises are designed to finish at the same time, there is a five-minute rest period at the end and the players then swap over.
“This is probably the longest run we’ll do in pre-season,” Northeast explains as the players, looking a little anxious, drift off to get their boots and trainers. “We try to keep things short and sharp because you know the average player runs about 10-12kms in a game but it’s never long-distance plodding, it’s always change of direction, jumping up for headers or going into tackles, so we try to make it as specific to the game as possible. You look at how much the game has changed over the last six years – the total distance is coming down but high-speed running distances are going up.”
Football has come a long way when it comes to training methods and it is hard not to smile when thinking back to a conversation with Alan Curtis, Swansea’s first-team coach, earlier in the day. Curtis was recalling one of his first pre-seasons, back in the early 1970s, when the Swansea players set off for on a six-mile road run to the Mumbles and he remembers asking several of the senior players why they were wearing tracksuit bottoms rather than shorts. “Where are we going to keep our fags?” came the response.
Monk sees nothing wrong with staying true to some of the old-fashioned values he picked up while running up and down the steps by Anstey’s Cove as an apprentice with Torquay United back in the mid-1990s, but he is also keen to embrace sport science and be innovative with his own methods. For example, this pre-season when it came to the fitness drills he decided to divide the players into groups according to their positions, which means full-backs run together and likewise centre-halves, midfielders and attackers.
“They’re going to be competing against each other throughout the season,” Monk says, explaining his thinking. “So it’s knowing where you’re at in those particular positions, whose fitness is where, but also to get them to bond with each other and support one another.”
Jack Cork has his eyes assessed as part of Swansea’s preparations for the new season. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/for the Guardian
Footballers can be deviously resourceful when it comes to beating the system in pre-season, whether that be hitching a lift home on a long-distance run (Curtis found out that was why the players carried change as well as fags in their pockets) or dropping out of an exercise deliberately early – a well-worn trick in the shuttle running bleep test – to make it easier to show an improvement when the drill is repeated later in pre-season.
Those days, however, are long gone. Swansea avoid exercises like the bleep test for that very reason and there is no way players can run within themselves with all the figures churned out from the GPS technology, which measures everything from how hard they are working to the ground they are covering.
Swansea marry up those numbers with the data they collect during matchdays and the resistance tests they conducted at the end of the season and on the first day the players reported back. Based on all those statistics, players have individual targets to hit in each session and if anyone comes up short it stands out. “You can’t cheat any more and that’s good,” Ángel Rangel says. “It’s all on the screen.”
In fact, everyone gets to view exactly how their team-mates fare in each exercise, which in the case of the fartlek session means that Barrow, the 22-year-old Gambian who made his Premier League debut last season, has the satisfaction of seeing his name in first place after running more metres at 20kmph-plus than anyone else.
“It’s about having an accountable environment,” Monk says. “I’m not here to hide anything. I don’t want them to hide from each other. The emphasis on it is to be truthful with all the group, for them to be transparent with each other. I have one-on-ones with them and tell them how they’re doing individually and so will Jonny. But the group needs to know where everyone is, because the group relies on each other in a game and you need to know that the man next to you is willing to, and able to, put it on the line for you.”
Leon Britton stands in his ‘Snoozebox’ at Swansea’s training ground. The club has installed 30 of them for players to sleep in between sessions. Photograph: Aled Llywelyn/for the Guardian
Garry Monk is stood in the centre of the training pitch, far enough away from the players running around the perimeter so as not to be breathing down their neck but close enough to see everything and not miss a trick. “Boys, don’t wait for each other,” Swansea City’s manager says as Wayne Routledge, Nathan Dyer, Bafétimbi Gomis, André Ayew, Marvin Emnes, Modou Barrow and Eder open up into a sprint.
It is just after 10am, a few rays of sunshine are breaking through the cloudy skies above and Swansea’s players are beginning to get a sweat on as pre-season training gets serious. “Push to the line, all the way,” Monk shouts. “Don’t sell yourselves short.”
There are four double sessions a week during the start of pre-season and today is one of them. Training in the morning is fitness-orientated and the afternoon drills revolve around the ball. During the four-hour break in between each session many of the players get their head down at the training ground … in an inflatable hotel room.
Monk gives the impression that he never sleeps – and not because he has three young children. The man who led Swansea to eighth place in the Premier League last season is a fiercely ambitious workaholic. He talks a lot about “accountability” and the importance of creating a working culture where there are no excuses for staff or players, and it is easy to see what he means.
This is a club where they monitor sleep patterns at home to check their players are in the best condition to perform. They have even invested in a drone that films training sessions from above so that every angle is covered when they trawl back through the footage – as they do at the end of each day – and edit the clips to highlight what worked well and what could have been done better as part of their feedback to the players.
Nothing is left to chance at Swansea, as the Guardian discovered when we were granted access to go behind the scenes for a day at the club’s training ground to see the level of work that goes into preparing for the start of a new Premier League campaign.
The fascinating insight begins with Jonny Northeast, Swansea’s head of sport science and fitness, holding a meeting with the players at 9.30am. With Monk and the rest of the staff looking on, Northeast debriefs the squad on how they performed in the previous day’s fitness exercise, which focused on “powerful changes of direction”. He puts up a graphic showing where every player ranked, from highest to lowest, according to the GPS data that traces every step.
Kyle Bartley is assessed in the Swansea City gym – the club has a backroom staff that looks into everything from the players’ sleep patterns to each step made in training. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/for the Guardian
Northeast goes on to explain that this morning’s drill will be a fartlek session, which involves sprinting for short bursts – the longest run is from the 18-yard line to the halfway line – and jogging in between. Half the players will be running around the perimeter of the pitch for seven laps in small groups, while the other half complete five laps of a longer circuit. Both exercises are designed to finish at the same time, there is a five-minute rest period at the end and the players then swap over.
“This is probably the longest run we’ll do in pre-season,” Northeast explains as the players, looking a little anxious, drift off to get their boots and trainers. “We try to keep things short and sharp because you know the average player runs about 10-12kms in a game but it’s never long-distance plodding, it’s always change of direction, jumping up for headers or going into tackles, so we try to make it as specific to the game as possible. You look at how much the game has changed over the last six years – the total distance is coming down but high-speed running distances are going up.”
Football has come a long way when it comes to training methods and it is hard not to smile when thinking back to a conversation with Alan Curtis, Swansea’s first-team coach, earlier in the day. Curtis was recalling one of his first pre-seasons, back in the early 1970s, when the Swansea players set off for on a six-mile road run to the Mumbles and he remembers asking several of the senior players why they were wearing tracksuit bottoms rather than shorts. “Where are we going to keep our fags?” came the response.
Monk sees nothing wrong with staying true to some of the old-fashioned values he picked up while running up and down the steps by Anstey’s Cove as an apprentice with Torquay United back in the mid-1990s, but he is also keen to embrace sport science and be innovative with his own methods. For example, this pre-season when it came to the fitness drills he decided to divide the players into groups according to their positions, which means full-backs run together and likewise centre-halves, midfielders and attackers.
“They’re going to be competing against each other throughout the season,” Monk says, explaining his thinking. “So it’s knowing where you’re at in those particular positions, whose fitness is where, but also to get them to bond with each other and support one another.”
Jack Cork has his eyes assessed as part of Swansea’s preparations for the new season. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/for the Guardian
Footballers can be deviously resourceful when it comes to beating the system in pre-season, whether that be hitching a lift home on a long-distance run (Curtis found out that was why the players carried change as well as fags in their pockets) or dropping out of an exercise deliberately early – a well-worn trick in the shuttle running bleep test – to make it easier to show an improvement when the drill is repeated later in pre-season.
Those days, however, are long gone. Swansea avoid exercises like the bleep test for that very reason and there is no way players can run within themselves with all the figures churned out from the GPS technology, which measures everything from how hard they are working to the ground they are covering.
Swansea marry up those numbers with the data they collect during matchdays and the resistance tests they conducted at the end of the season and on the first day the players reported back. Based on all those statistics, players have individual targets to hit in each session and if anyone comes up short it stands out. “You can’t cheat any more and that’s good,” Ángel Rangel says. “It’s all on the screen.”
In fact, everyone gets to view exactly how their team-mates fare in each exercise, which in the case of the fartlek session means that Barrow, the 22-year-old Gambian who made his Premier League debut last season, has the satisfaction of seeing his name in first place after running more metres at 20kmph-plus than anyone else.
“It’s about having an accountable environment,” Monk says. “I’m not here to hide anything. I don’t want them to hide from each other. The emphasis on it is to be truthful with all the group, for them to be transparent with each other. I have one-on-ones with them and tell them how they’re doing individually and so will Jonny. But the group needs to know where everyone is, because the group relies on each other in a game and you need to know that the man next to you is willing to, and able to, put it on the line for you.”
