Latest Apprentices

This is my first blog so I will start by saying a bit about myself. I’m 18-years-old and come from Bolton. I was at the Blackburn Rovers Academy for a while and then got the chance to join the Youth Team as an Apprentice at Carlisle United where I’m now in my second year…

We won convincingly at the weekend and even though there were areas we can still work on the week was pretty straight forward and consisted of quite a lot of football fitness…

On Tuesday we had a fairly long day of training – normally Monday and Tuesday are the longest training sessions during our normal week. In the morning we had our gym session at 8 o’clock like usual, with it being first thing in the morning most of us lads are still half asleep…

On Monday it was our first day back from our four day break, so obviously we needed to make sure we had done some work over the time off just to keep ourselves ticking over. The four days were a way to sort of refresh ourselves because since July we’ve hit training pretty hard and haven’t had a real break as such so we had time off to rest and refresh ourselves and get ready to work hard until Christmas…

On Tuesday we had another day which most of the lads hate… ‘the long one’. This is when we’re in the gym at 8.00am and then have morning and afternoon sessions before watching the first team play at home at night. I normally get home just after 10pm and it’s a very long day to say the least, but it does seem to go quite quickly…

I started off on Monday by checking out my weight to see how much I had lost during the past week. I weighed in at 151 pounds and I normally weigh 157; I had lost six pounds which is around half a stone! ..

Had training at the Dragon School again at the beginning of the week working on passing drills, dribbling and turning and some small games. Evening training consisted of 3 v 2 attack v defence in a narrow area and then we split off into small 4 v 4 games to finish…

After turning 18 on the 3rd of October, things went downhill for me. My birthday was on a Friday and I found out that day that I wouldn’t be starting against Sunderland on the Saturday because one of the third years was playing down and so consequently I lost my starting place. ..

Had training at the Dragon School again at the beginning of the week doing passing drills, technique work and some shooting. Evening training consisted of possession work and crossing and finishing with a big game.

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We trained at the School as usual this week. On Monday we worked on long warm ups with the ball, keeping the ball in the air, then we moved onto some passing drills. We followed that with dribble track to warm up then some shooting on Tuesday.

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This would be my last week in Sweden, we had two training sessions mid-week but because we were out the race for promotion it was not serious and we just had a bit of fun…

After looking fit throughout most of the game on Saturday, it was important that we kept our fitness up, so on Monday we started off by doing two timed perimeter runs. This consists of running around the whole of the academy site at a good high pace. We did a warm-up lap first, had a few stretches and then set out for the two runs…