My early return to Blighty and why red is very much the in-colour within sports science
YES, you read the headline correctly.
Our pre-season trip to Scandinavia may still have just over three days to run, but this will be my last tour diary.
That’s because I’m penning it from the West Midlands.
I flew home from Copenhagen yesterday on medical grounds, as it was decided it would be best for me to continue my rehab work, on what is a minor calf injury, at the club’s training ground.
The state-of-the-art facilities we now have – like the Alter-G anti-gravity treadmill and HydroWorx pool – should help to speed up my recovery so that I can rejoin pre-season training as soon as possible.
This has obviously not been an ideal start to the new campaign for me and it’s the first time I’ve ever had to fly home early from a pre-season tour.
But the good news is the problem is only minor. It just needs to be managed and there’s no better place for that than at our training ground.
I’ll wrap up my tour diary with a couple of funny tales.
It is customary for our coaching and fitness staff to instruct any players who fail to do a training exercise properly to endure a set of press-ups as punishment.
But in yesterday evening’s session, I hear the tables were turned. It was actually a member of staff who had to take the medicine!
Our fitness coach Matt Green miscalculated the amount of equipment he needed for a training drill he asked the players to perform, which meant it wasn’t possible.
So a red-faced Matt was forced to plunge to the ground and suffer the press-up punishment he usually dishes out – much to the lads’ amusement!
It hasn’t actually been a good couple of days for our sports science department. The day before, during our tenpin bowling alley visit, Chris Barnes, our lead sports scientist, had his designer flip flops go missing from the footwear storage area.
It meant that, on departure, he had to keep on his bowling shoes, which the alley kindly loaned to him to prevent him leaving bare-footed.
A few of the backroom staff decided to walk back to the hotel from the complex and Barnesy raised a few eyebrows as he trekked through Malmo City Centre in his shiny red shoes!