Under a slate grey sky in the unassuming East Yorkshire village of Cottingham, a drone buzzes overhead.
We’re 40 minutes into day three of Hull City‘s pre-season and the eye in the sky ensures there’s no place to hide. It is recording every second of training and the footage will be pored over later, some of it spliced up to be shown in team meetings.
On one pitch there is a relentless 5 v 5 game playing out. Opposite that it’s 2 v 2, a furious contest of attack and defence. In both the first pass has to be played by the goalkeeper, aligning with the team’s philosophy of building out from the back.
Behind them the rest of the squad are being put through a gruelling aerobic session which consists of slaloming through a series of poles, skipping over six inch hurdles to hone agility and then drilling a shot into a miniature goal. Despite fatiguing limbs, the accuracy rate is impressive.
Hull’s bright young manager Liam Rosenior patrols the session with a whistle and stop watch. “Hard work gets you where you want to be,” he shouts to the group at one point.
As if to prove the point, his winger Adama Traore steps off the pitch to throw up. He jumps back on, collects a short pass and darts in the direction of the goal.
i is here to see how a modern pre-season works, granted full access by the Tigers to a session that was, Rosenior admits as we talk at length in his spotless office afterwards, part of a programme that has been six months in the planning.
The two hour work out is punctuated by a series of three minute drinks breaks before they move on to the next exercise in the “carousel”.
Players end the morning bent double but these are moments the Hull manager believes will define their season, building physical and mental resilience.
“We push the players hard but they understand our process,” Rosenior admits later. When he was a player, pre-season was usually separated into fitness work and then when you were deemed fit enough, the footballs came out to work on shape and systems.
But he wants it to be continuous work at a higher intensity, replicating the ferocity of a typical Championship game. The idea is to make Hull one of the fittest and strongest teams in the division.
Things have moved on a lot from the era when players would roll back into pre-season carrying a holiday paunch after a few weeks of indulgence. All Hull’s players had summer nutrition programmes that they stuck to rigidly.
Technological advances help. Here the coaching staff have iPads which provide live data feedback through GPS vests the players are wearing. At one point, Rosenior chats to fitness coach Barry Tempest about possibly tapering the session as several of the players are pushing into their “red zone”. But they decide one last blast is fine.
“I’m a young coach with old-school values,” Rosenior reflects afterwards.
“The values of working to your maximum and pushing yourself to a limit, that has to stay. Any player will tell you when they look back on seasons that have gone well, 99 per cent of them have come when they’ve had a fully loaded pre-season and built their bodies right and made sure their muscles are right.
“So that’s what we’re trying to do.”
The session concludes with “Doggies”, a series of shuttle runs for every player overseen by the club’s head of physical performance Matt Busby.
One of the team’s slogans this year is “Make sure we hit the line” and there is a rule for these runs – if one player misses the line by even an inch before turning everyone runs again.
The idea is to build a culture of togetherness, where teammates “care” about each other. If one person cuts a corner, everyone suffers and the team fails.
That culture comes from the top and Rosenior operates with an open door policy. He wants to know about his player’s families and home life. He’s just had a short pep talk with Ghanaian striker Benjamin Tetteh before we speak, and the noise and laughter coming from the coaches’ room suggests he’s overseeing a happy ship.
Rosenior asks if I noticed what happened at the end of the session. He points out that senior players were carrying the mannequins off the pitch, tidying up bibs and cleaning the water bottles and disposing of discarded energy drinks.
“That’s massive,” he says. “I subscribe to the All-Blacks philosophy of no d***heads. The small details make a massive difference. When we go away from home, we leave the dressing room spotless. We’ve worked hard on the culture here.”
Rosenior is in his element, sensing the possibility of the season ahead. He speaks of the “great group” he inherited when he took over, of the “fantastic signings” the club have lined up to add to a core group he believes can surprise people.
The close season for him was just a few days, spending half-term with children Leah, 15, Izzy, 13, and AJ, 12.
“I was still taking calls but it was nice to get that time off,” he says. But management is intense and relentless, now firmly the preserve of the obsessive.
He says: “It’s 24/7. You go to sleep but you wake up at 2am and you’re thinking of certain players, certain positions and training the next day. It’s constant.”
Win, lose or draw, Saturday nights end the same way.
“The feeling is different if you win but the energy is the same,” he says. “You’re absolutely shattered.
“Hopefully my mum or [wife] Erika have ordered a Chinese and then I can walk in, have a couple of glasses of wine and pass out.”
Midweek nights usually end at 3am, the alarm set for 7am to start it all again. But Rosenior wouldn’t change it. He feels like he was born to manage, having tagged along to training grounds with his father Leroy from the age of 10.
He coached his school team about defensive shape at the age of 11 so it’s no surprise he eschewed the “easy life” of punditry when he hung his boots up, despite having a natural flair for it. Sky Sports offered him a good contract which would have been a relaxed three days a week, talking about the game. But he wanted to “throw himself into the unknown”, embracing a precarious profession.
“My missus always reminds me I’ve chosen the hard route,” he says, with a wry smile. His mum frets about what people say on social media when his team loses.
The hope is that won’t happen too much this season. Hull were 15th last year but finished well and there’s a growing buzz about the club.
Charismatic owner Acun Ilicali, a Turkish media mogul who bought the Tigers from the unpopular Assem Allam last year, has funded free travel to away games and kept season ticket prices low. 14,000 memberships have been sold.
Lessons have been learned from last summer, when the pace of signings was furious as they recruited virtually a whole new team.
“This club is waiting to take off. Hull is a place that doesn’t get the investment or attention it deserves and I desperately want to make the people proud,” he says.
“Luton proved you don’t need to spend millions in the Championship, you just have to have a set of values and beliefs.
“Well we have a plan, we believe in it, we’re going to stick with it and we really hope it will get us there.”
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