Shrewsbury Town’s first-team squad will be travelling to Portugal this summer for some warm weather training.
The squad will fly-over in the first week of July and spend a week working hard on fitness, team-shape and team-bonding ahead of the first pre-season games.
This will be the first time that Town have travelled abroad in recent years and Manager Paul Hurst believes it will be a good opportunity for his side to get some hard training under their belts.
“We’re going away to Portugal”, Hurst told ShrewsWeb.
“We will be in training for a week and then we will go away. That’s something that I don’t thinks happened recently at the football club and from my point of view I think it’s about having a group and getting them to bond.
“I know there will be some cynics out there that say ‘Why do you have to go to Portugal to do that?’, but we will also have a game out there against decent opposition.”
“It’s two-fold. One, is the work that they will be doing in terms of the fitness work and the early signs of organisation, but also the bonding side. We’ve got to get the group as close-knit as possible in order to get the success we all want.”
Team-unity is something that Paul Hurst has been looking to build ever since he took charge in October 2016 and he is hopeful that this will be a good opportunity to help develop that unity.
“They will be living in each other’s pockets for a week and hopefully that will force them to perhaps talk to each other and get to know a little bit about each other”, said Paul.
“Team-spirit is massive and you don’t get anywhere by having a group that’s splintered. They don’t have to have everything in common, they don’t have to be each other’s best friends, but there has to be an element of respect with each other.
“We will try and get them to the point where when they walk out on a Saturday, if anyone is picking on their teammates then the rest of their lads are behind them and everyone will run through a brick wall for each other.
“I was listening to a bit on Sky Sports about the Lions (Rugby) and a couple of ex-players who has been on a couple of tours talked about how the best success they had was when they had the team-spirit in the group.
“They talked about how the players that were out of the team made the mood and set the tone and I spoke about that last season. The ones that are in the team shouldn’t have anything to moan about, but it depends on the ones that are a little bit frustrated and the attitudes they have.
“That goes back to the process of getting good people in that are willing to fight, not just throw their toys out of the pram at the first sign of them not getting a place in the starting line-up.”