Every day of pre-season planned already – Liam
back in the Dutch top-flight after securing promotion from the Eerste Divisie, in which they can be crowned champions with victory over Telstar tonight.
For Robins supporters, the news will be additionally pleasing as it will be the first friendly to be played at Ashton Gate since City hosted Aston Villa in 2021. The club are yet to confirm any further plans for their pre-season calendar, but Manning revealed before the campaign ended that their schedule has already been planned fully.
“Every day is planned already,” the
Robins head coach said. “We obsess on planning, so the six weeks, the return dates, testing, staff meetings. The six weeks are planned in terms of what session we do on each day, what running activity they’re doing each day, what distances need to cover.
“There’s no excuse not to plan that stuff and then when you’re in it you have to be a little bit reactive and tweak things, but at least you’ve got the nucleus of a plan to work off.
“The big bit is that it gives you an opportunity just to get some of the core principles and build on some of the stuff we’ve done and especially how we work. The volume of content and the decision-making element which I’ve spoken about before, players being able to make good decisions and problem solve.
“That you can replicate on the grass and kind of go through that review process in a slightly less pressurised environment, but it’s easier to recreate certain pictures in the game, so one that we’ve done recently is four-v-three practice so when we do regain it, we counterattack and we get these pictures of three-v-two or four-v-three so we can design a session and deliver it.
“So we’ll periodise tactically. We’ll spend a week on each of the phases and then we’ll link the phases and then you get the opportunities of the games to try and bring it out. The matches are all pretty much done now as well,” the City boss added.
“The whole 45 minute thing, we’ll just do an internal game and then we build them up so the aim is to try and get every player an internal 45 and then a 60 and then two or three 90s ultimately.”
Forest Green Rovers have handed their former player Yan Klukowski the role of head of academy. He takes over from Hannah Dingley, who has moved to the FA of Ireland.
Klukowski played for Rovers from 2010 to 2014 and more recently has been lead development coach (U9-U12) in the FGR academy.