View: Aston Villa players being put through relentless pre-season training by Steven Gerrard
Aston Villa are currently away on their pre-season tour of Australia and the squad seem to be enduring a gruelling training schedule.
Steven Gerrard’s side are preparing to face Leeds United on Sunday morning (17 July) in what is their first of three games Down Under.
The club are putting their stars through a relentless training schedule as they prepare for the new season, as shown by a video posted on their official Twitter page on Friday afternoon (15 July).
Players are seen going through what looks like a tougher version of the infamous bleep test in the Australian sunset.
Gerrard jokingly asked Boubacar Kamara and Tim Iroegbunam if they hate him at the end of the session and several players looked like they would be sick from exhaustion.
A direct response
A brutal pre-season training schedule is to be expected in football, but in the case of Villa, it seems to be a direct result of a common complaint Gerrard had for his players last season.
He described Villa as a “45-minute team” after their defeat to Wolves back in April and repeated the claims several times before the end of the campaign.
Villa showed a general lack of fitness at points throughout the season, often starting games excellently and fading out in the second half.
This was shown most clearly in the 4-0 defeat to Tottenham in April, where Villa put in a strong, physical first-half performance before sinking miserably to three second-half goals.
Most fitness work is done in pre-season with players maintaining it throughout the regular season, so the extra intensity would appear to be Gerrard taking direct action to build his squad up.
It is refreshing to see this from Gerrard as he looks to right the wrongs of last season, but there is still a lot of work to do to properly make up for last season’s shortcomings.
In other Aston Villa news, Morgan Sanson and Frederic Guilbert are out to save their Villa futures this summer.