Mat Sadler's Shrewsbury Town pre-season diary - July 4th
Mat Sadler is offering a diary from Shrewsbury Town's pre-season camp in Portugal - here's his first extract.
It was a very early morning start (to fly to Portugal), we were up at 3am.
It’s a shame because I live two minutes from Birmingham Airport but we were flying from East Midlands!
Obviously everyone’s got together, it was a pretty short flight, only two-and-a-half hours, and good for us all to be together.
Everyone was in good spirits considering the time that they’d been up.
We’re definitely looking forward, if not slightly apprehensive, about what the week’s going to bring.
There’s not a cloud in the sky, I haven’t seen a cloud yet.
Weather-wise this is amazing, exactly what you’d want from warm-weather training. I think when we’ll be training today it’ll be 30/31C and then getting hotter throughout the day.
On the whole the place looks fantastic.
We’ve got a nice balcony overlooking the pool so we’ve touched lucky there.
The food’s really nice, the football pitches look great. I’ve just seen the gym, which is exactly what we need, and it’s all on site. We don’t have to go looking for anything, it’s all here. The compound which we’re on at the moment, it should be a good week.
We’ve been up early doors for our training sessions. Skitty (physio Chris Skitt) has got a thing for us to do exercise before having anything to eat.
So before breakfast we’ve been up and had a run around the golf course, which is on site here.
There were a few weary eyes getting up and going straight into a session.
We were soon wide awake as the sprinklers smashed us in the face!
We’ve been told to expect some very tough sessions.
We’re training early to avoid the heat of the day, although it’s 30C early in the morning. That’ll be tough.
But the manager highlighted that if we can get comfortable and used to training in this sort of heat and these conditions then we’ll get back home and hopefully it’ll feel a lot easier training in English weather.
That being said I’m sure there’ll be a heatwave when we get back. And it always seems to be very warm on the first game of the season.
Hopefully this training over here will prepare us for that.
We’re in a room of five so that’s good. Straightaway you’re interacting with not just your room mate, you’re interacting with four other lads.
Everyone seems to be getting on really well, there’s no cliques forming or anything like that. It all seems very together.
We’re starting to get to know what people like and dislike, what will nark some people, little things maybe we didn’t realise before.
I’ve found out Tote (Aristote Nsiala) can’t swim and nearly drowned in the pool yesterday, so we’ll be pushing him in there later today!
