McGhee: New season starts now

Jul 2 2008 by Andrew Weston, Wishaw Press

MOTHERWELL boss Mark McGhee believes the club’s pre-season training schedule will be more important than ever as his side prepare for a potentially tricky start to the new SPL campaign.

McGhee’s charges will check back into Fir Park tomorrow (Thursday) after their short summer break.

And the 51-year-old expects his players to “hit the ground running” as they look to build on a superb first season under his leadership that saw the Lanarkshire outfit finish third in the league.

“Last season we started really well and that put us in good stead for the remainder of the campaign,” McGhee told the Wishaw Press this week.

He continued: “This year on paper we have got a much harder programme whereby we are playing all the teams at the top end of the league first as opposed to last year when we played all the teams at the bottom.

“So we have got to be really fit, stronger than them and hit the ground running.”

McGhee can expect a hot reception when Motherwell travel to Edinburgh to face Hearts on the first day of the season having knocked back an offer to become their new manager in May.

Games against Aberdeen, Dundee United, Hibernian and both halves of the Old Firm will follow – a pool of fixtures that could determine whether ‘Well can continue where they left off last term.

On the coming weeks, McGhee said: “We will assess the level of fitness on the players return and then we will decide at what level we start them running – whether we start on the longer stuff or whether they come back in a condition where we can go into the faster more powerful related fitness stuff.”

Last season defender Mark Reynolds revealed that some of the players felt that they were the fittest they had ever been in their careers and believed that was the reason why the squad stayed relatively injury free throughout the successful campaign.

McGhee added: “A huge part of football these days is physical fitness and last year we got them fit but didn’t injure anyone in pre-season along the way.”

The club will return to Austria for their warm weather training camp on July 13 after it proved a popular base for the first team squad last summer.

“Last year when I arrived the club had already organised a pre-season trip to Austria,” McGhee revealed.

“It was so good we decided to go back.

“Getting the team away from the training ground at Dalziel is useful and sometimes a little bit of a change of scenery and privacy can be good.”

The Steelmen will play two friendly matches against Romanian side CFR Cluj and Czech outfit FC Zlin at the training camp in the market town of Abtenau near Salzburg before returning to play McGhee’s former club Wolves at Fir Park on July 23.

Meanwhile the Fir Park gaffer has claimed that there will be new faces donning the Claret and Amber shirt next season and has still not ruled out a possible move for Rangers misfit Alan Gow.

He said: “I am looking for players all the time and by the start of the season we will have some new players on board.

“I don’t know if it is going to be in any way realistic to get Alan Gow but he is certainly a player that we would like to have.”

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