Swindon Town Manager David Flitcroft has promised fans that his side will play attacking football and be on the front-foot in 2017/18.
Following relegation from the Sky Bet League One last season, Chairman Lee Power has opted for a change in approach in a bid to help the Reds bounce straight back.
And, after being given the top job last week, Flitcroft has already put in plenty of hard work to lay the foundations for a successful season, while he told Swindon fans what sort of football they can expect from his team.
“The word philosophy is something that you want to bring in when you start out as a young manager or as a young coach,” he told swindontownfc.co.uk.
“What I’ve done now is look at the way I want to do things and it is a methodology, there is a method to how we win games and you’ve got to be flexible and you’ve got to be adaptable in systems and certainly in tactics.
“But one thing that will run through everything we do will be a competitive streak to the football team and there will be front-foot performances, especially at home.
“We will go and attack teams.
“There has been a style of play at Swindon and a philosophy at Swindon to maybe overplay at times and not create opportunities – I love creating opportunities and I love getting the ball into wide areas, I love getting the ball forward and making sure that we create enough chances for the strikers that we will have at the football club to score goals.
“All of the teams I’ve ever had have always scored plenty of goals and that’s something we’ll look to do at Swindon.
“We have to be flexible in the way that we want to play and have a squad that is adaptable and wants to be coached and wants to be taught in different methods of winning a football match.
“Your structure has got to be good, your set-up has got to be good and I want players that are coachable so you can adapt if you’ve got to play a different system for a tough away game somewhere.
“I want players who can take information on very quickly with a Saturday-Tuesday turnaround, so you have to look at a lot of qualities in a player in terms of what they can bring to the party.
“That’s my job with the current players as well to make them understand over a six-week period and by the start of the season they will know exactly what to expect from a Dave Flitcroft team."
Flitcroft guided Bury to an impressive promotion to League One during the 2014/15 campaign and he will use that experience to help him achieve the same goal with Town this season.
“It is probably two different scenarios because there was a squad of 24 or 25 when I first went into to work at Bury, so we put a lot of base work in the season we stayed up,” he added.
“I had half a season to try and instil discipline and build my method into the players and build a strength base.
“We then did an off-season programme where players had to complete twelve sessions over the summer and we had someone in full-time during the summer to do a strength session with the younger players.
“When they came back for pre-season, which was meticulously planned, they had unbelievable base fitness levels and we started off the season flying.
“That is the bit that is different but we encountered everything that League Two had to throw at you and every different way of playing and we managed to get out of it with a record points total for Bury.
“We had another record points tally in League One where we stood firm and we galvanised our position, so that was something we did with more experienced players.
“I put value on players like that. We got Leon Clarke in on a free and ended up selling him for very good money, James Vaughan is another one who we got in on a free and he’s being linked to some fantastic clubs now.
“We did it with experienced players and we brought them in and made them better and we won games, so I am looking to do a similar thing here because I think that’s what Swindon needs.
“If we put value on players then fantastic and that’s part of a winning and successful formula, but that’s not really a priority although it becomes part of the process and teams want your players if they are successful and there’s not a lot you can do about that.
“That is a fantastic position to be in and those players don’t have to be babies because League Two and League One, as we’ve seen with Coventry, is not a league where you can put too many inexperienced players in.”
