Shrewsbury Town

Shrewsbury Town are set to welcome Championship side Cardiff City to the Greenhous Meadow on Saturday, with Shrews manager Micky Mellon admitting the games are more than just fitness.

Town opened their pre-season campaign with a hard fought 2-2 draw with Wolves last weekend and with over two weeks of intense training under their belts, Micky is pleased with what he is seeing from his squad.

“We’ve now carried on the work from the Wolves game that we believe needed to be done to build up our fitness work,” said Micky. “We’ve had a good weeks training and the lads, again, have worked really, really hard so it’s going well.

“You just look for that improvement and try and get the principals across of the way you want to play the game, which is important. 

“Then you try to build up little partnerships among players and use the opportunity for people to have a look at different things that you might want to try during the season. So you just try and get the most benefit out of the games as possible along with the fitness work.”

Pre-season is all about trying out systems, formations and players, and Micky admits that it can be hard to make sure everyone gets to that level of match fitness. 

But now that the club, with the help of Super Blues, have invested in a new GPS programme, the gaffer believes it will benefit the club as they look to get the most out of their training sessions.

“You have to do that as well (mixing the players up a bit) because we’ve got a whole group that we’ve got to try and get match fit or as much fitness under their belt as possible. 

“There’s a lot of things to consider but we’ve got a good fitness department here who are well on top of that at the moment.”

And on the GPS programme, Micky admits it’s not just about tracking players to make sure they’re training hard, adding: “I trust them and believe they give their all every day. There’s a good trust in there. 

“It’s more to do with us learning about what certain sessions do to the players, fatigue wise. Or trying to learn more about the players as individuals what part of the fitness they’re not working at – is it aerobically or anaerobically or is it sprinting or something like that? Do we need to put something more into the training sessions that we build an overall all-round fitness rather than aerobic fitness? So we’ll be able to add little things to the programme to make sure that they do that during the week.

“For example, centre halves don’t sprint as much as strikers or full backs so it’s important that you fit that into the training sessions.”

Town’s training this week had the addition of a trip away from the Greenhous Meadow training pitch, as Micky and his staff took the players White Water Rafting, something he feels is crucial in building team spirit.

“Although it’s lovely here and we enjoy being here, you can get a bit stir crazy seeing the same thing. “We’ve been here over two weeks now so we broke the week up and did team building and a bit of White Water Rafting yesterday (Wednesday) to get them mixing with each other and take them out of their comfort zones and get to know each other better. 

“We all enjoyed a very good day and were well looked after. 

“It was quite physical but rapport amongst each for what you will need through the season is important and things like that go a long way in doing that to build a team. And it was a bit of fun as well and everyone seemed to enjoy it.”