Pre-season games give players chance to get into winning habit - Lorimer
YEP 11/7/13
by Peter Lorimer
In the grand scheme of things, pre-season results are not so important.
I remember well the summer of 2007 when Leeds United failed to claim a victory but went on to reach the play-off final.
There are plenty of examples too of years when we’ve won just about every friendly and then done nothing.
Fitness and team-building are the most crucial aspects of pre-season, in the eyes of every manager anyway. But in my experience it does you good to get into a winning habit early. If I’m being honest, I always took summer results quite seriously.
Why? Because you don’t build up confidence by losing matches. You build it up by getting into the groove and feeling like you’re hitting form. The 5-0 win at Farsley on Saturday saw Noel Hunt, Matt Smith and Dominic Poleon find the net – that’s three of our forwards with a notch on their belts already. It can’t be a bad thing.
You’ll argue, of course, that Farsley were very limited opposition and you’d be right. The same might be true of the sides we’re playing in Slovenia, although something tells me that all three games out there will be demanding. European sides tend to be raring to go at this time of year.
But when I was a player I much preferred playing the smaller sides in pre-season – second or third division clubs (or mugs, as we used to call them back then).
It sounds a bit harsh but as better players and a better team, we could bully them and have our own way. I’d look to score a hatful of goals and find my touch up front. As much as you might assume that difficult friendlies are the way to go, I feel that straightforward matches are better for building up your belief. What good does it do a striker to be scratching around against rock-solid defence?
Back in the day we never toured abroad in pre-season. Travelling wasn’t as easy or as cheap as it is now and places like Slovenia weren’t so accessible. More often than not we played local sides and stayed close to home.
Slovenia strikes me as a good base for Leeds because Brian McDermott knows the country and obviously likes what it offers him. There’s method in the madness of working in 30-degree heat! What I can’t abide is the money-making exercises which so many Premier League clubs engage in by going to America or the Far East.
I played in the USA and the travelling there is ridiculous. It takes longer to fly from north to south in the States than it does to get there from England in the first place. You’re asking players to deal with big-time changes and to endure hours and hours in a plane. It doesn’t seem like the best means of breaking rusty lads back in. Or to put it another way, some of these tours appear to put money and publicity ahead of football in the list of priorities.
It’s hard to know how close Brian is to identifying his best team – especially because I’d expect to see another three or four signings before the season starts – but I’m sure he’ll want to come home from Slovenia knowing who’s on song, who is showing the right attitude and who he should start building his line-up around.
It’s been a little tricky in the sense that a couple of players are injured. Sam Byram, for example, has had a hip problem for a while and you need to take care with struggling players in the summer.
Surfaces tend to be firmer and drier and the risk of recurrences is quite high. Leeds have been very careful with him so far.
Knowing players as I do, they’ll all be looking to Brian for hints about who’ll be starting when the season goes off against Brighton.
You try not to give it too much thought at this stage but a lot of lads can’t help themselves. They’re competitive by nature and when Brighton roll up on August 3, every single one of them will want to play. The atmosphere will be light and relaxed but secretly the lads will be giving no quarter. You can’t afford to.
by Peter Lorimer
In the grand scheme of things, pre-season results are not so important.
I remember well the summer of 2007 when Leeds United failed to claim a victory but went on to reach the play-off final.
There are plenty of examples too of years when we’ve won just about every friendly and then done nothing.
Fitness and team-building are the most crucial aspects of pre-season, in the eyes of every manager anyway. But in my experience it does you good to get into a winning habit early. If I’m being honest, I always took summer results quite seriously.
Why? Because you don’t build up confidence by losing matches. You build it up by getting into the groove and feeling like you’re hitting form. The 5-0 win at Farsley on Saturday saw Noel Hunt, Matt Smith and Dominic Poleon find the net – that’s three of our forwards with a notch on their belts already. It can’t be a bad thing.
You’ll argue, of course, that Farsley were very limited opposition and you’d be right. The same might be true of the sides we’re playing in Slovenia, although something tells me that all three games out there will be demanding. European sides tend to be raring to go at this time of year.
But when I was a player I much preferred playing the smaller sides in pre-season – second or third division clubs (or mugs, as we used to call them back then).
It sounds a bit harsh but as better players and a better team, we could bully them and have our own way. I’d look to score a hatful of goals and find my touch up front. As much as you might assume that difficult friendlies are the way to go, I feel that straightforward matches are better for building up your belief. What good does it do a striker to be scratching around against rock-solid defence?
Back in the day we never toured abroad in pre-season. Travelling wasn’t as easy or as cheap as it is now and places like Slovenia weren’t so accessible. More often than not we played local sides and stayed close to home.
Slovenia strikes me as a good base for Leeds because Brian McDermott knows the country and obviously likes what it offers him. There’s method in the madness of working in 30-degree heat! What I can’t abide is the money-making exercises which so many Premier League clubs engage in by going to America or the Far East.
I played in the USA and the travelling there is ridiculous. It takes longer to fly from north to south in the States than it does to get there from England in the first place. You’re asking players to deal with big-time changes and to endure hours and hours in a plane. It doesn’t seem like the best means of breaking rusty lads back in. Or to put it another way, some of these tours appear to put money and publicity ahead of football in the list of priorities.
It’s hard to know how close Brian is to identifying his best team – especially because I’d expect to see another three or four signings before the season starts – but I’m sure he’ll want to come home from Slovenia knowing who’s on song, who is showing the right attitude and who he should start building his line-up around.
It’s been a little tricky in the sense that a couple of players are injured. Sam Byram, for example, has had a hip problem for a while and you need to take care with struggling players in the summer.
Surfaces tend to be firmer and drier and the risk of recurrences is quite high. Leeds have been very careful with him so far.
Knowing players as I do, they’ll all be looking to Brian for hints about who’ll be starting when the season goes off against Brighton.
You try not to give it too much thought at this stage but a lot of lads can’t help themselves. They’re competitive by nature and when Brighton roll up on August 3, every single one of them will want to play. The atmosphere will be light and relaxed but secretly the lads will be giving no quarter. You can’t afford to.
