Underdog tag is fine by me

We´ve just had the second day of pre-season. Did about three hours of non-stop training and it wasn´t too bad. This is my 15th pre-season now so I should be used to it really! Coming back to training is far less of a problem these days than it used to be. Football has come a long way and players come back after the summer pretty much the same weight or even a few pounds under. In the old days you had players coming back really out of shape and you´d start off by doing cross-country runs just to get rid of the extra weight.

I´ve had a pretty busy summer with a few holidays packed in. I went to Turkey with the family, Dubai with my wife and also to Cyprus where I´m looking to set up a football academy. I´m buying some land over there at the moment and hopefully it should be up and running in the next three years. It will be a football academy and a sports complex as well which clubs can use for their pre-season training or for winter breaks.

The plan is for me to go over there and run it myself once I finish playing. That doesn´t mean to say I don´t want to give management a try once I hang up my boots, but there are so many players who want to be managers when they finish and so few jobs that you need to have something else to fall back on. I´m keeping up with my coaching badges all the same. I´ve done the UEFA ´B´ and I´ll be starting the ´A´ next.

For now though I´m just concentrating on playing as many games as I can for Yeovil. We´re going to be up against it and I think we´re a lot of people´s favourites to go down, but that´s fine with me. It takes the pressure off the team and gives you that extra bit of motivation to prove people wrong.

I´ve done my utmost to get back fit for this season and while you can never say you´re 100 per cent fit I´m happy with where I am. I´ve been working through the summer with the same personal physio that Michael Owen and Dean Ashton use and that´s really helped.

Because of injuries I haven´t had a full pre-season in three years and last year I didn´t play a game until after Christmas. It makes a massive difference. You get five weeks before the season starts to get in shape and if you miss it then you´re always playing catch-up. Once the season is underway you may only get a week or two before you´re thrown back into it because you can´t afford to miss games. If I can get through pre-season then that will be a massive boost.

I´ll be back soon with my thoughts on Euro 2008 without England…