GOALKEEPERS may play a different role in the team but aren’t exempt from doing the hard graft of pre-season training.
Speaking ahead of today’s pre-season away game at Mickleover (3pm), keeper Jon McLaughlin, who played a keep part in Burton Albion’s title-winning season, says he is putting in the hard yards along with the rest of the squad at present.
He says: “There are a few different things that we do in training but in the first couple of weeks you integrate more with the rest of the squad than you do normally during a season. There’s plenty of reason to get your base fitness in with all the running all the lads are doing.
“The gaffer likes to make sure his goalkeepers are working with the rest of the players so we have been fully involved with all that.
“Fitness has moved on a lot from the old days of just bringing people in and flogging them around a track for no real purpose.
“The first couple of weeks here is about seeing where players are at, making sure they have come back at a good level of fitness, that your base level is right up there where it needs to be before you start working on the football again.
“You can always put your house on it that the first couple of weeks back will be scorching and we have had record temperatures this year.
“We do hard sessions, double sessions, making sure the players are working really hard so we are 100 per cent at the start of the season. The first few weeks are hard graft and you have to tough it out.
“As goalkeepers, it’s a different kind of fitness in a way. It’s not so important for us to be able to run and run. We need to work on specific things and you eventually tailor training towards the football side of things.”