Arsenal boss Jonas Eidevall says he and his staff will look at their training programme for next season, both to optimise high performance and challenge at the top of the table and with injuries in mind.
The Gunners won the Conti Cup and got to the Champions League semi-finals amidst a horrendous injury crisis which saw four players succumb to ACL injuries. Eidevall says he and his staff are planning changes next season to meet both challenges.
“It is a very busy programme, we have a lot of weeks that the Germans call ‘English weeks,'” explained Eidevall. “Where you are playing three games in seven days. We need to base things into that reality so we can fit things in and so we are still developing.
“One of the principles I work with is the 20-mile march and that’s that you basically do the same things every week. Don’t try to run 100 miles per hour and try to accomplish everything in the first week.
“Then the games catch up with you and you have lots of press conferences and you have to start saying, ‘oh those things we said were important in week one, they are not so important now.’
“We know what that looks like now so we need to plan a programme where we can be consistent throughout, so we don’t do some things in August that we later say ‘no we don’t have time, we need to prioritise or strip back.”
Last summer, the women’s team played training matches against the Arsenal U15 boys’ team in order to get them used to playing against high pressing teams in the Champions League.
“When we talk about overloading (mentally in training scenarios) and forcing players to take quicker decisions, to run a little bit faster, how do you make them recover quicker between games?
“When we do that we have to really make sure that we look at how the playing schedule is looking so we can do that continuously throughout the whole season. These are the ideas I have in my head for how we can try to apply that for a season long programme.
“I really hope we can get some nice details in there to lift this group above the level of what we have done this year.”
I hope the staff still has the confidence of the players given that all the players saw this season was more and more injuries.
Thing is, it’s just not that uncommon unfortunately. Lyon have just had their fifth ACL in 18 months. It’s a challenge for the whole sport.
Complete long shot but was wondering if anyone had any spares for the villa game tomorrow? Travelling down and desperate to go.
Reassuring to read. JE is very open and honest. I would imagine most managers have a plan for improving the squad but it’s great for fans to hear what it is! And what they did last pre-season made a big difference.
I’m not just going on these remarks, of course, but I like the combo of humility, ambition and willingness to take responsibility that I see in Jonas. He has a very different personality to Arsene Wenger (whom everybody likes, while JE is more of a Marmite type) but JE has many of AW’s best qualities.