I got along to training again today. A fine but mostly overcast conditions with the sun making only a brief appearance. It was a closed session so once again OER's reporters had exclusive access
. Sorry no photos though.
In rehab today were Cogs, Patto, Cleve, Sugar and Cotch. Petts trained for most of the session and only stepped out during the game-based drills. Cotch is still just making a short appearance at the start before disappearing again without doing much apart from chatting to the staff. Sugar did the same thing later on. Cleve just watched on for most of the session (he's out due to a foot injury and was wearing a moonboot a few days ago a friend told me). Cogs and Patto did some 200m runs plus some kick to kick. Hopefully Cogs is not far away.
Apart from the usual handballing and kicking drills, most of the session was based on game-based drills and pleasingly working on areas we stuffed in last Thursday night. The first game-based drill was a mini scratch match where the team in white had to rebound and attack through the midfield zone of the other team in green singlets. As we've seen in most of the preseason games the side with the ball goes wide and indirect to try and outflank the zone. Even Terry afterwards admitted it's not pretty when my friend asked him if she had to put up watching this rubbish all year
. Plough said you can't just kick directly up the centre as the midfield zone is in the way and means the ball comes back the other way just as quick over your head as we saw today when there was a turnover. I told Plough just to make sure the boys bloody kicked straight and he agreed it cost us the game as you don't win games kicking 5.15. Fortunately in this drill most of the shots inside 50 went between the two big sticks even from shots on a wide angle. Royal was inside the forward 50 as a guide for the forwards to lead within the "vee" rather than towards the boundary unless the kick itself went wide.
The next drill was goalkicking on the run and from snaps. 5 cones were set up about 30-40m out from the Sherrin Stand goals on different angles and groups of players had shots from each of the 5 cones. On two of the cones Royal and David King would tap the ball down and our smalls like Nahas, Morton, Gilligan and Whitey would have quick snaps. Obviously we want to improve the number of crumbing snap goals.
That was about for most of the squad. I noticed Jack stayed out there longer practising his set shots directly in front. Hopefully he's learnt to stick to a routine as far as number of steps in the run-up etc.
Any questions fire away.