BRFC - The Nostalgia Thread

[Gav]

Spot on.

[aletheia]

1 Name the Rovers goal scorer on the left

2 How many goals did he score for rovers?

3 What was the match and what year?

4 name the 2 players on the right

5 What is missing from the picture, dead centre below the players?

6 How big was the crowd?

[Tyrone Shoelaces]

Well -

1) Peter Dobing for sure. However the record books say the scorer was Alistair McCleod.

2) 104 goals.

3) Rovers v Man Utd in 1959.

4) Ronnie Cope and Bill Foulkes. The one just behind Dobing’s boot could be Wilf McGuinness when he had hair.

5) A little dog.

6) 39,621.

Edited Saturday at 18:48 by Tyrone Shoelaces

[Upside Down]

2 hours ago, Tyrone Shoelaces said:

Well -

1) Peter Dobing for sure. However the record books say the scorer was Alistair McCleod.

2) 104 goals.

3) Rovers v Man Utd in 1959.

4) Ronnie Cope and Bill Foulkes. The one just behind Dobing’s boot could be Wilf McGuinness when he had hair.

5) A little dog.

6) 39,621.

I bet you didn't even have to look that up either.

[Tyrone Shoelaces]

1 hour ago, Upside Down said:

I bet you didn't even have to look that up either.

I knew some of that but I had to check up some details. Good job he didn’t ask what the dogs name was. I’m guessing “ Rover “.

[aletheia]

Don't know the dog's name -it was a stray. 🙂 

Yes, you're right, it was 1-1, our goalscorer was Ally MacLeod - just checking you were awake 😉 

I've got Peter on 88 goals for Rovers?

Edited yesterday at 12:00 by aletheia

[Tyrone Shoelaces]

40 minutes ago, aletheia said:

Don't know the dog's name -it was a stray. 🙂 

Yes, you're right, it was 1-1, our goalscorer was Ally MacLeod - just checking you were awake 😉 

I've got Peter on 88 goals for Rovers?

Maybe that’s League goals ? Not counting FA and League Cup.

[aletheia]

Looking again, I think it was (for Rovers) 71 goals in 133 games.

In his career, 185 goals in 542 games in this country.

Edited yesterday at 16:42 by aletheia

[aletheia]

Mods just remove this if it is too long or irrelevant.

Thought some old timers might finid this amusing re training methods. Sounds knackering. In today's Sunday Times.

How do Premier League footballers get so fit? I went to find out

Era of losing holiday weight and ice baths in bins is history: as Tom Kershaw discovers in visit to Brighton & Hove Albion, top-level fitness is a relentless and technical beast

Each morning at Brighton & Hove Albion’s training ground starts with a pinprick. “The players don’t always love that part,” chuckles Gary Walker, the club’s head of performance, who uses the daily blood sample to track key biomarkers related to muscle damage and stress.

A self-reported questionnaire then logs the players’ sleep time and quality, fatigue and soreness, and mood and wellness. In the secretive, cutting-edge world of football’s fitness departments, no stone is left unturned to meet the demands of an ever-faster, stronger and more intense game.

When Fabian Hürzeler became the Premier League’s youngest permanent head coach a year ago he told Walker that he wanted Brighton to “dominate the physical side of the game”. Last season the squad duly covered more ground per game on average (106,897 metres) than any other team in the league and outran their opponents in 80 per cent of matches.

Yankuba Minteh (467m) and Carlos Baleba (322m) were also among the top five players for average sprint distance in their position, with the former’s max speed recorded at 36.4km/h. Try sticking the gym treadmill to even 20km/h to get a sense of how fast that is.

Running capacity alone does not predict success — Nottingham Forest covered the lowest distance per game in the league last season (99,730m), suffered fewer injuries and ultimately denied Brighton a European place — but it is fundamental to Hürzeler’s high-pressing style.

“Our starting point is the head coach’s philosophy and how he wants to play and the physical components for each position,” Walker says. “Then we as a performance department need to prepare the players accordingly so they have the physical qualities to execute that technically and tactically.”

It means Brighton are undoubtedly one of the fittest squads in the Premier League. Despite the arms race and constant poaching of staff between clubs, Walker, a Loughborough University graduate who spent more than a decade at Manchester United, allowed The Sunday Times to observe the forensic methods that have put a famously analytics-driven club at the forefront.

In days of old, pre-season training camps consisted of arduous cardio to shed excess holiday weight and a line of plastic bins filled with iced water for recovery. There is still a semblance of that culture as Josh Hook, who together with Dominic May and James Hamilton makes up Brighton’s physical preparation team, barks orders such as, “If you’re cutting corners here, how do I know I can trust you out there?” as the players go through their warm-up, but these weeks provide the bedrock for the entire season and the present reality is more akin to a science project.

When the players returned to training on July 3 after a three-to-five-week rest, depending on if they had international duty, they all went through a two-day testing process. After the medical department had completed cardiac screenings and all manner of musculoskeletal and neurocognitive checks, Walker used the club’s in-house Dexa scan — a form of x-ray — to measure the players’ bone density, muscle and body fat to spot any imbalances or asymmetry.

That was followed by numerous tests using devices designed for sport to establish baseline readings for the strength and power of specific muscle groups. Treadmill assessments then measure how efficiently the body uses oxygen during exercise.

Sophie Grimson, the club’s performance data scientist, pored over the results for hours to help Walker devise a bespoke training programme for each player. “It all has to transfer to the pitch,” Walker says. “It’s not about getting better in the gym.

“We’re trying to identify off-field determinants that can affect on-field performance. Essentially that is sprinting, changing direction, acceleration, deceleration, duelling, jumping and performing those actions repeatedly for 90 minutes.

“A lot of injuries occur in deceleration, so we are also trying to pinpoint where players have particular deficits to address. It’s not a ‘Big Brother’ sort of stage. We’re getting as much information as possible to help manage the training process and make them better football-playing athletes.”

A typical week in pre-season will include four training sessions with the ball, three gym sessions and one friendly match, along with any individual work. The gym sessions are usually split between upper body and leg strength, with players limited to about two hours in total per week, while almost all cardiovascular training happens on the pitch.

The strongest players Walker has worked with can bench-press 1.5 times and deadlift twice their body weight for five reps, but the exercises are predominantly a combination of light dumbbell weights, body-weight exercises (such as pull-ups, planks and sit-ups) and plyometrics that focus on explosive moments.

Every session on the pitch is then tracked using the club’s own GPS to monitor the players’ progress and performance, with instant reports available to review on iPads afterwards.

“There are always four or five players that will look at [their data] every single day to see how much distance they’ve covered, how much they sprinted, just to appraise themselves,” Walker says. “I think with Fifa [the video game] and the metrics on that, players are so much more savvy or aware of tech and information now. They don’t just want to be told what to do, they really want to understand why they are doing it and take ownership of their programme.”

Now into week five, Walker will do another sprint assessment and send clips to Speedworks, a consultancy founded by Jonas Dodoo, who has coached Team GB 100m sprinters and the Olympic long jump gold medallist Greg Rutherford.

He will advise how players can alter their running mechanics (posture, stride length, arm movement) to improve acceleration and speed along with minimising injury risk. Skinfold measurements are taken regularly to measure body fat, which tend to range from 40–65mm depending on position, and the club’s nutritionist, Paola Rodríguez-Giustiniani, will constantly alter their macronutrient intake as workloads steadily increase to reach the desired level of match fitness in time for the opening game of the season.

The hectic nature of the fixture schedule, even without European football this season, means maintenance, recovery and injury prevention quickly become paramount. After every match Rodríguez-Giustiniani recommends that players consume at least one gram of carbohydrates per kilogram of body mass per hour for four hours.

For a centre back like Lewis Dunk that would equate to a total of 18 medium slices of multigrain bread or three whole 500g packets of dried pasta, but a shake covers the first hour and the remainder is typically split between two meals.

“Most players don’t want to eat straight after a game so we’ll try and take that first window with fluid,” Walker says. “At home we’ll provide players with a smaller meal at the stadium and then we’ll want them to go home and eat again. When we’re away we’ll do the first meal on the bus back. It’s a challenge because it’s a lot of carbs they need to put back into their system.”

The players will also take several supplements to aid performance and recovery, including creatine and beta-alanine, while the individual blood analysis is used to determine their ideal vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acid intake.

Sleep is the second pillar of recovery and the club recently partnered with a specialist consultant. Most players wear a fitness tracker, such as a Whoop band, and share their data with the club so Walker’s team can identify any trends, but the adrenaline of a match day means sleep afterwards can be particularly inconsistent.

“We use nutritional supplementation — tart cherry juice [which can naturally elevate melatonin] and other products — to assist the sleep process, but we don’t want players using sleep narcotics. That’s very much a medical situation,” Walker says. He might also recommend breathing exercises, meditation and yoga, if suitable to a player’s personality, while blackout blinds and a pillow from home can be beneficial on overnight trips.

The GPS tracking, along with the biomarkers and questionnaires, means the performance team is able to constantly assess the players’ stress levels. Second Spectrum, an optical tracking system in every Premier League stadium, and Sportlight, which uses the same laser technology as driverless cars to measure distances, help to build up a granular picture of a player’s strain as well as gather performance data during games when exertion is at its highest.

 “There is acute versus chronic loading,” Walker says. “We don’t want our players having huge spikes in load, we want them to have quite consistent training weeks. If players do have quite sharp changes it doesn’t mean they are going to get injured, but that’s a first alert. It’s also not just about the loading a player does, it’s how they respond. We could run the same distance but age, genetics, nutrition, sleep, recovery and the treatment process mean we react completely differently.”

It is a collaborative approach between the coaching, performance and medical teams, with training schedules and programmes constantly tweaked; if a player started a match on a Saturday, it is likely they would be given the Sunday off and their gym session on a Monday would be more focused on recovery.

If a player exhibits or reports signs of an injury, the doctors and physios will inevitably take the lead, but there are a number of therapies the performance team can use in the club’s in-house spa when a player’s body is otherwise stiff or stressed, including saunas, contrast baths, cold water immersion, compression boots, hyperbaric oxygen chambers and cryotherapy to reduce stress, depending on the symptoms.

If it is a joint-related stiffness, for example, Walker will also encourage aerobics in the club’s poolto help the range of motion, along with more traditional methods such as foam rollers, stretches and massages. “You don’t want to just throw the kitchen sink at it every single day, particularly in pre-season, because then the body adapts to it,” he says. “Our philosophy is to be more focused on when to recover.”

The technology is now advancing so quickly with artificial intelligence that performance departments are constantly finding new edges to be gleaned. Walker is armed with a database of charts and spreadsheets on his laptop, which he swiftly closes to avoid revealing any more state secrets, although from a quick glimpse it is a code that would be impossible to decipher by the untrained eye anyway.

“I think our challenge is we collect so much information, [so] how do we make it manageable for people and give it back in a way that is understood?” he says.