Swindon Town

STEVE Hale, Town’s Head of Goalkeeping, says that his ‘keepers are worked just as hard as outfield players when it comes to pre-season training despite the different types of sessions put on for both sets of players.

“You always get banter between the outfield players and the goalkeepers and them (outfield players) thinking it’s easy over here but not too many of them will come across into my sessions and have a go at it because I’m sure they wouldn’t like it so much if they did!” he told STFC PlayerHD.

Hale went on to describe what kind of training his goalkeeping unit has done over the past couple of weeks.

“For the first two weeks of pre-season a lot of my sessions are physically-based,” he explained. “Then, as we get through the sessions, I start to tweak it a little bit more to ball-related and more goalkeeper-specific.

“Even when we’re doing the ball work in the early parts of pre-season it will have more of a physical outcome. If they drop a ball it’s not the end of the world to me. I’m looking more at ‘are they working physically hard as that time progresses?’ We’re now getting to the stage where it’s more important about their techniques, how they’re handling the ball and what they’re doing and start to come away from how much the physical element is important to me. So they’ve got a lot of their base work done in the first two weeks, now we will start to do more ball work.”

With the departure of Wes Foderingham over the summer, Tyrell Belford is Town’s only senior goalkeeper. After an hour of game-time against Everton last weekend, the Head of Goalkeeping assessed the young stopper’s display.

“He played from the back as much as he can which we promote and our style of football,” he said. “He is an aggressive passer of the ball in my opinion - Wes was probably a little bit more reserved at times which probably comes from his experience but Ty likes to play in tight situations and did that quite well on Saturday.

“He made a few good saves and the big thing really was getting some game time under his belt because he was on the bench for pretty much the whole of last season. The important thing for Ty is getting game minutes so he can build up his level of experience but for the first sixty minutes against Everton, a Premier League side, he equipped himself really well.”

To see the full interview with Steve, click here to go to STFC PlayerHD.