I played for Bristol City for nearly eight years for managers that included Russell Osman, Joe Jordan, John Ward and Tony Pulis, and pre-season training was the one period of the campaign that most players dreaded.
Don’t get me wrong, it was always great to see the boys again and the first morning back was full of banter, with the lads describing their tales of the summer, but then the reality would hit home.
The management team would enter the dressing room donned in their brand-spanking new training kit and then we would get the shout ‘right lads, on the scales’.
We would get weighed individually and fined if we were more than three or four pounds over what we weighed on the last day of the season.
You always knew those who had enjoyed an over-indulgent summer because quite often some lads would be on the running track an hour before training with black bin-liners under their training kit trying to sweat off a few pounds and save themselves a few quid.
The footballs were rarely out for at least the first week of pre-season – it was always fitness work – and that meant running, a lot of it. I remember one year on the very first day back Joe Jordan took the squad on an eight-mile run.
Now Joe always prided himself on fitness, indeed I fully expect he is the same weight today as he was when he was playing for Leeds, Manchester United, AC Milan and Scotland.
“Big Joe’ was up at the front setting the pace with that familiar toothless grimace on his face and it was up to the rest of us to try and keep up with him. It was lung-bursting stuff and at the end of it the management team had to send a search-party out to try and find Martin Kuhl, who had been tailed off and eventually arrived at Ashton Gate some 20 minutes later – Joe was not amused.
The following season Joe changed tack and took us away to an army camp near Exeter for pre-season where we spent a week in the soldiers’ barracks- no TV, no mobile-phones in the barracks and the food certainly wasn’t to the players’ liking.
We were swimming before breakfast and running morning and afternoon. But one of the funniest sights I’ve ever seen as a footballer happened on that trip.
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